Shell scripting: die on any error

Suppose a shell script (/bin/sh or /bin/bash) contained several commands. How can I cleanly make the script terminate if any of the commands has a failing exit status? Obviously, one can use if blocks and/or callbacks, but is there a cleaner, more concise way? Using && is not really an option either, because the commands can be long, or the script could have non-trivial things like loops and conditionals.

From stackoverflow

• With standard sh and bash, you can

  set -e
  

  It will

  $ help set
  ...
          -e  Exit immediately if a command exits with a non-zero status.
  

  It also works (from what I could gather) with zsh. It also should work for any Bourne shell descendant.

  With csh/tcsh, you have to launch your script with #!/bin/csh -e

  Pistos : Thanks, this seems to be what I want. I should sharpen my Google fu, I guess... :)

  Jonathan Leffler : Note that commands in conditionals can fail without causing the script to exit - which is crucial. For example: if grep something /some/where; then : it was found; else : it was not found; fi works fine, regardless of whether something is found in /some/where.

• May be you could use:

  $ <any_command> || exit 1