Zsh pipestatus

When you create a pipeline in the your preferred shell of choice, let's take bash as an example

ls | fd oop.py | echo "hello world"

You can get the exit code of the last command by running echo $? but what if you wanted to get the exit code for each of the commands in the pipeline?

Bash provides a convenient variable called PIPESTATUS which contains a list of exit codes.

ls | fd oop.py | echo "hello world"
echo "${PIPESTATUS[@]}"
> 0 0 0

That all works okay but the command doesn't seem to work in zsh and that's because the variable is called pipestatus and you write it to the stdout by running echo $pipestatus.

In my shell only the last exit code was being returned which was strange.

After a bit of digging on the interent, I found a Stack Exchange Post where a similar question was asked. Apparently, when something else is using a pipe, it can override pipestatus, mostly in a prompt related automation.

What immediately came to mind was my .zshrc config. I have powerlevel10K setup and other useful tidbits, something there could be overriding it.

I backed up my file and then deleted every line.

After that, I tried it once again.

ls | fd oop.py | echo "Hello World"
echo $pipestatus

and it returned:

0 0 0

I am still not sure what is responsible per se but I just wanted to document this. I'll do a bit more digging during the weekend.