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in reply to best practices for checking system return values for piped commands?

Just to add a little to what others have said, 'true' is not the best possible choice for a 2nd command since:
1. it isn't reading it's stdin in so won't detect anything wrong.
2. 'true' tries its hardest to live up to its name, always exiting with status zero.
Bill H
perl -e 'print sub { "Hello @{[shift]}!\n" }->("World")'

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Re^2: best practices for checking system return values for piped commands?
by markjugg (Curate) on May 04, 2006 at 15:27 UTC

    "true" is a great choice to illustrate my test, as it is a great example of an utility which "succeeds" even with no input piped to it.