In #bash, instead of putting "$?" In your $PS1 to have the final return code, use "${PIPESTATUS[@]}" to have the detail of ALL piped commands: echo foo | grep bar | tr z a | cat echo ${PIPESTATUS[@]} 0 1 0 0 So grep is the command that failed in the pipeline.

Shell-operator is a tool for running event-driven scripts in a Kubernetes cluster - flant/shell-operator