Tag Archives: .bash_profile

There are times when you want to monitor the exit status through a whole pipeline of chained commands. But the default behavior of Bash is to show the exit status of the right-most (last) command in the pipe. This can a problem, specifically in scripting.

I prefer if the pipeline’s return status is the value of the last (rightmost) command to exit with a non-zero status, OR zero if all commands in the pipeline exit successfully.

This can be achieved by adding the following line to your script:

This can also be added to your ~/.bash_profile to make the change permanent.