Gee, imagine if shells with errexit option enabled wrote some diagnostic output to stderr before exiting. "Add your own error checking instead", how do I check which piece of pipeline has failed, exactly? The PIPESTATUS variable is bash-specific and was not standardized.
? Why are you replying to me? My position was pretty clear:
"Pipefail is useful and very hard to emulate on pure POSIX; you need to create named fifos, break the pipeline into individual redirections and check for error on each line.
And that is fine; but sometimes you want to treat a pipeline as a "single command" and then you can use pipefail to abort the pipeline on error. Then you can handle the error at the granularity of the entire pipeline without caring which part failed."
By the way, I never script in Bash; I only script in POSIX primitives using dash as my executable.
