One cool thing to note about pipes in bash is that you can extract the return codes from every command in the pipeline, as opposed to using $? which always just returns the last.

If you check out the PIPESTATUS environment variable, it creates a nice array of return codes, so you could do

command 1|command 2|command3

and then evaluate PIPESTATUS as an array and get all the separate error codes back – assuming command 2 failed

echo ${PIPESTATUS[@]}
0 1 0

It’s pretty helpful and I’ve only discovered it recently, even though I’ve been working on *nix for over a decade. Maybe I’m just to used to doing things the old-fashioned way

Best Wishes,

Mike