Catching errors in pipes

Dear all,

Is there a recommended way to catch errors in pipelines of coommands that
are used in recipes, please?

If so, how backward-compatible are they?

I saw the .SHELLFLAGS variable but also found a bug report saying that
its content is passed to the shell as one single argument. Is it thus
mandatory to prefix every pipeline with set -o pipefail; or is there a
more global way to get the desired behaviour?

Many thanks in advance for any help,

Sébastien.