I've recently taken to not bothering with shell scripts at all. I just use Python instead. The type system, while it's by no means state of the art, is still miles ahead of the stringly-typed bash. The libraries are excellent; much can be done with the standard library alone. The scripts are much faster (even though the language isn't particularly tuned for performance), since I don't need to spawn a subprocess for each little string manipulation task. And if I ever need to ‘shell out’ to an external process, there's always the subprocess module that is much more robust than ‘set -e’ ever was.
Seriously, if you can avoid it, just don't write shell scripts at all. Use a real programming language instead.
Seriously, if you can avoid it, just don't write shell scripts at all. Use a real programming language instead.