Do you have a link to a good explanation of why you'd set those? The "set -e" seems to indicate that the script would fail immediately if the borg backup job fails, which would prevent the Zabbix "send" command from alerting the monitoring system.

Thank you for your feedback, it's given me more to learn and think about!

you're right that just putting the set options on top of your file would be a bad idea. you need to write your script to actually account for these errors, making possible exitcodes entirely transparent

    1 #!/bin/bash
    2
    3 set -euo pipefail
    4 if ${DEBUG:-false}; then set -x; fi
    5
    6 function random_exitcode(){
    7         return $(( RANDOM % 5))
    8 }
    9
   10 function handle_error(){
   11   case "$?" in
   12     1)  echo "handling exitcode 1!";;
   13     2)  echo "handling exitcode 2!!";;
   14     3)  echo "handling exitcode 3!!!";;
   15     *)  echo "encountered unexpected exitcode: $?"; exit 2;;
   16   esac
   17 }
   18
   19 random_exitcode || handle_error

  random_exitcode || LAST_EXITCODE=$?
  case "${LAST_EXITCODE:=0}" in ...