I wrote my first Upstart script today, and like anyone wanting to get the job done quickly I haven't read the entire cookbook.

So after spending a couple of minutes trying to figure out why my two line script is only executing the first command, I returned to the cookbook and searched for sh -e and lo and behold:

Remember that Upstart runs every script section using /bin/sh -e. This means that if any simple command fails, the shell will exit.

As a default that probably makes sense for most scripts but it certainly surprised me. It should at least be mentioned where they introduce the script section in the cookbook.

So if your script contains commands that might fail and that's fine by you then you can || true them so the shell won't exit.