A new non-interactive mode has been added to the HBase Shell (HBASE-11658). Non-interactive mode captures the exit status (success or failure) of HBase Shell commands and passes that status back to the command interpreter. If you use the normal interactive mode, the HBase Shell will only ever return its own exit status, which will nearly always be 0 for success.

To invoke non-interactive mode, pass the -n or --non-interactive option to HBase Shell.