You can group with curley braces too. This can be especially useful for input/output redirection over a chunk of commands.
Be careful with using parenthesis -- this means you're now in a subshell! That "exit 1" will NOT terminate the entire script, but instead set "$?" to 1 for the next command. Additionally, any variable or environmental changes will be lost (which may be desirable) once you're outside of that block.
Thanks for the tip! I knew what I was doing was probably not right, but it worked when I needed it in the past (probably because of setting pipefail). It's very much welcome to know how to do it better :)
Curly braces are POSIX and work fine in dash. (Perhaps when testing you forgot these restrictions, which are the same as in bash: there must be whitespace after {, and a newline or semicolon before }.)
Be careful with using parenthesis -- this means you're now in a subshell! That "exit 1" will NOT terminate the entire script, but instead set "$?" to 1 for the next command. Additionally, any variable or environmental changes will be lost (which may be desirable) once you're outside of that block.