Yes. Always chain sequential commands with &&. Always.

This style is pretty prevalent when writing test cases in shell (or just shell scripts in general), e.g. when using something like sharness[1].

[1] https://github.com/mlafeldt/sharness

"bash -e" has much the same effect: it basically exits on the first failed command, with considerations for pipelines, conditionals and the like.

http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bashref.html#index-s...

Note this recent discussion about bash -e, including my post that "the disappointment with set -e is that it does not work everywhere".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8054440

It's nice to have, but I wouldn't rely on it to save me - it's no replacement for checking return codes properly.

Certainly, but it's a good habit to get into, like ``use strict`` in Perl.

"Perl and line noise are distinguishable. Properly written perl starts with 'use strict'; line noise rarely does."

When writing test cases in shell, you generally just implement a die() function and execute all commands `foo || die "bar"`

If you don't need to specify a custom message, you could also use "set -e" to die automatically on command failure and use "trap ... EXIT" to display some kind of failure message.