Referencing 27 ‘set’ options in Bash

The aim of this page📝 is to list all 27 options one can use in combination with the `set` command in Bash.

Pavol Kutaj
1 min readMar 11, 2024

use set -<opt> to activate and set +<opt> to deactivate option

  • one possibility is to use set -o <option_name> for example
  • another is to use a flag of the option set -<flag>

referencing 27 options of set

examples

errexit (or e) - Exit immediately if a command exits with a non-zero status.

set -o errexit
# or
set -e

nounset (or u) - Treat unset variables as an error when expanding them.

set -o nounset
# or
set -u

pipefail - Return the exit status of the last command in a pipeline.

set -o pipefail

noclobber - Prevent overwriting files with > and >| redirection.

set -o noclobber
set -C

noglob - Disable pathname expansion (globbing).

set -o noglob
# or
set -f

xtrace (or x) - Print commands and their arguments as they are executed.

set -o xtrace
# or
set -x

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Pavol Kutaj
Pavol Kutaj

Written by Pavol Kutaj

Today I Learnt | Infrastructure Support Engineer at snowplow.io with a passion for cloud infrastructure/terraform/python/docs. More at https://pavol.kutaj.com

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