How to get last return value

If you want to get the last return value in bash, do the following:

$ echo $?

For doing something a tad more elegant in scripts etc. The following suggestion from StackOverflow looks pretty nifty:

EXITCODE=$?
test $EXITCODE -eq 0 \
    && echo "something good happened" \
    || echo "something bad happened";
exit $EXITCODE

However echo is not recommended, but printf is:

EXITCODE=0
test $EXITCODE -eq 0 \
    && printf "Success: %d\n", $EXITCODE \
    || printf "Error: %d\n", $EXITCODE;
exit $EXITCODE

References