You're welcome.

It's shorter and i'm lazy.
Also it only 'contains' 1 task per situation, so this is enough.
However, if there are more lines to be made for each situation, i'd go with a proper if/else statement as well.

If you want to check wether a variable exists (or has content) or not (empty) and DECIDE what to execute according to that, it's a bad choice to fill the variables anway.

One usualy uses this to make sure a REQUIRED variable gets it's DEFAULT or FALLBACK values, as in:

Code:

var=${1:-default-value}

I have.. uhm.. misspelled.. my... uhm.. concern... in the previous post, because:
${1:-} doesnt actualy do something, and is basicly the same as ${1}, but it (the first one) indicates that you wanted to put some variable there, which then might interfere.
Also, by setting a string to an empty variable, you'd say the script to ALWAYS use '$proxy', because '$proxy' would contain something. (well, not in your actual code, that's just bad syntax)

The set -u only requires you to declare the variable before invoking it.
So any of these are valid options for that case/command:
hth

--- Post updated at 21:54 ---

On a further note, your exit codes in those functions just exit the fuction, therefor return could be used there.

For example, try this:

Code:

my_msg(){ echo "${1:-some string i dont care} ; return 1 ; }
my_msg
ret=$?
echo $ret
exit $ret

And then change the return number.

Hth