In Bash scripting (and shell scripting in general), we often want to check the exit value of a command to decide an action to take after it completes, likely for the purpose of error handling. For example, to determine whether a particular regular expression regex was present somewhere in a file options, we might apply grep(1) with its POSIX -q option to suppress output and just use the exit value:

grep -q regex options

An approach sometimes taken is then to test the exit value with the $? parameter, using if to check if it’s non-zero, which is not very elegant and a bit hard to read:

# Bad practice
grep -q regex options
if (($? > 0)); then
    printf '%s\n' 'myscript: Pattern not found!' >&2
    exit 1
fi

Because the if construct by design tests the exit value of commands, it’s better to test the command directly, making the expansion of $? unnecessary:

# Better
if grep -q regex options; then
    # Do nothing
    :
else
    printf '%s\n' 'myscript: Pattern not found!\n' >&2
    exit 1
fi

We can precede the command to be tested with ! to negate the test as well, to prevent us having to use else as well:

# Best
if ! grep -q regex options; then
    printf '%s\n' 'myscript: Pattern not found!' >&2
    exit 1
fi

An alternative syntax is to use && and || to perform if and else tests with grouped commands between braces, but these tend to be harder to read:

# Alternative
grep -q regex options || {
    printf '%s\n' 'myscript: Pattern not found!' >&2
    exit 1
}

With this syntax, the two commands in the block are only executed if the grep(1) call exits with a non-zero status. We can apply && instead to execute commands if it does exit with zero.

That syntax can be convenient for quickly short-circuiting failures in scripts, for example due to nonexistent commands, particularly if the command being tested already outputs its own error message. This therefore cuts the script off if the given command fails, likely due to ffmpeg(1) being unavailable on the system:

hash ffmpeg || exit 1

Note that the braces for a grouped command are not needed here, as there’s only one command to be run in case of failure, the exit call.

Calls to cd are another good use case here, as running a script in the wrong directory if a call to cd fails could have really nasty effects:

cd wherever || exit 1

In general, you’ll probably only want to test $? when you have specific non-zero error conditions to catch. For example, if we were using the --max-delete option for rsync(1), we could check a call’s return value to see whether rsync(1) hit the threshold for deleted file count and write a message to a logfile appropriately:

rsync --archive --delete --max-delete=5 source destination
if (($? == 25)); then
    printf '%s\n' 'Deletion limit was reached' >"$logfile"
fi

It may be tempting to use the errexit feature in the hopes of stopping a script as soon as it encounters any error, but there are some problems with its usage that make it a bit error-prone. It’s generally more straightforward to simply write your own error handling using the methods above.

For a really thorough breakdown of dealing with conditionals in Bash, take a look at the relevant chapter of the Bash Guide.