Fail fast in case of errors Lines 3–5 are related to handling erroneous situations. If any of the situations happen that these settings have effect on, they will exit the shell script and prevent it running further. They can be combined to set -ueo p

shell_patterns.sh

#!/bin/bash

set -u  # Exit if undefined variable is used.
set -e  # Exit after first command failure.
set -o pipefail  # Exit if any part of the pipe fails.

ITERATIONS=$1  # Notice that there are no quotes here.
shift
COMMAND=("$@")  # Create arrays from commands.

DIR=$(dirname "$(readlink -f "$0")")  # Get the script directory.
echo "Running '${COMMAND[*]}' in $DIR for $ITERATIONS iterations"

WORKDIR=$(mktemp --directory)
function cleanup()
{
    rm -rf "$WORKDIR"
}
trap cleanup EXIT  # Make sure that we clean up in any situation.

for _ in $(seq 1 "$ITERATIONS"); do
    (  # Avoid the effect of "cd" command from propagating.
        cd "$WORKDIR"
        "${COMMAND[@]}" \  # Execute command from an array.
            | cat
    )
done