To avoid that problem, you'll want to set -o noclobber in scripts or, better, for your login shell, and let it be inherited by subshells, including those that run your shell scripts.

The Test-Path cmdlet can keep you from going bonkers by offering a little bit of script pre-error-handling.

How do you know your shell script is error-free before you deploy it? Of course, nothing can catch all errors, but you might try ShellCheck.

Anyhow, I was writing a script and given that CTP3 now supports the good old try and catch error handling methodology. My error handling logic, of course, was using it.

A simple four-line script unexpectedly returned a host of errors for Brien. The issue turned out to be deceptively simple.