How to avoid a shell script exiting on failure for particular commands

Question

The following script runs with the -e option, so it will exit if any of the commands in it fail:

#!/bin/sh -e
command1 #script should fail if command1 fails
command2 #script should NOT fail if command2 fails
command3 #script should fail if command3 fails

How can I make the script not to fail on command2?

Answer 1

command1
command2 || true
command3

Answer 2

You could turn off the setting as required:

#!/bin/sh
set -e

command1 #script should fail if command1 fails

set +e
command2 #script should NOT fail if command2 fails
set -e

command3 #script should fail if command3 fails

Answer 3

if you are running a command in shell that exits you can prevent it by running it inside a sub-shell:

(. script.sh)