I bet you’ve seen a lot of scripts with seemingly innocent if [ -e blah ];then ...; else ...; fi or something similar . What’s the problem? if has at most two branches while test , [ and [[ have three different exit codes. Oops.

If you make a syntax error (or any other error occurs) in the test , [ or [[ expression, it will return the exit code 2 (or above, according to man test​). if will take the else branch. If you are lucky, you will notice the error message from the test, [ or [[ commands. If not, the else branch will always be executed.

I don’t want to use bash. The pitfall above is one of the many reasons. Unfortunately, I do use bash because it’s still best tool for some tasks. I’m working on alternative to bash. It’s called NGS, the Next Generation Shell. In NGS, the situation above is solved as one would expect from a modern programming language: exit codes 2 and above throw exception.

If you also think that there should be a viable alternative to bash, you are welcome to help me working on it.

Update 2021-12-31: real world example is at https://github.com/awslabs/aws-lambda-cpp/issues/140

Happy coding! Hope it’s not in bash 🙂