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I highly recommend ShellCheck[0] if you're writing any bash. With the warnings and stylistic advice it provides, I feel like I can actually be confident that my

I highly recommend ShellCheck[0] if you're writing any bash. With the warnings and stylistic advice it provides, I feel like I can actually be confident that my scripts are doing what I think they're doing. [0]: https://github.com/koalaman/shellcheck https://github.com/koalaman/shellcheck

helb 9y ago
I second this, it's a great tool. However, don't let it give you a false sense of security. Shellcheck probably won't say anything about the "biting" parts from the article – because they are valid, just behaving a bit different than the user expects… That goes for any linter or static analyser i guess.
- bjackman 9y ago
  Dunno about this particular case but I'd say linters are exactly for finding things that are valid but behave differently than the user expects. E.g. "if (x = 1)" is valid C but i'd be pretty unimpressed if a linter didn't flag it up!
- jwilk 9y ago
  Yup, shellcheck 0.4.4 says this this code is fine.
hultner 9y ago
Thanks! That's a great tip. I've been writing a large amount of shell scripts (mainly sh not so much bash) and already made some improvements thanks to this!
cavanasm 9y ago
I recently started having to do a lot of shell work, and shellcheck has helped immensely. It was unfortunate that there was no precompiled version of GHC for my OSX version on homebrew though, so it took 5 hours to build GHC. I ended up turning off all the power save and auto sleep features on my laptop to make sure it kept going.
- FooBarWidget 9y ago
  You know you can just install the binary from Homebrew right?
amorphid 9y ago
Thanks for the tip. Will check it out.
pmarreck 9y ago
That's awesome and I've added it to my toolchain. But I can't help but think that this is more a sign of how wart-filled Bash really is. Perhaps it's time for a new shell language that is less arcane, with fewer gotchas and simply less bug potential?
- paulddraper 9y ago
  Well there's dash, fsh, zsh, etc. Unless you mean something entirely different than POSIX shell family, e.g. Powershell, Python, Ruby, or JS.

helb 9y ago

I second this, it's a great tool. However, don't let it give you a false sense of security. Shellcheck probably won't say anything about the "biting" parts from the article – because they are valid, just behaving a bit different than the user expects… That goes for any linter or static analyser i guess.

bjackman 9y ago
Dunno about this particular case but I'd say linters are exactly for finding things that are valid but behave differently than the user expects. E.g. "if (x = 1)" is valid C but i'd be pretty unimpressed if a linter didn't flag it up!
jwilk 9y ago
Yup, shellcheck 0.4.4 says this this code is fine.

hultner 9y ago

Thanks! That's a great tip. I've been writing a large amount of shell scripts (mainly sh not so much bash) and already made some improvements thanks to this!

cavanasm 9y ago

I recently started having to do a lot of shell work, and shellcheck has helped immensely. It was unfortunate that there was no precompiled version of GHC for my OSX version on homebrew though, so it took 5 hours to build GHC. I ended up turning off all the power save and auto sleep features on my laptop to make sure it kept going.

FooBarWidget 9y ago
You know you can just install the binary from Homebrew right?

amorphid 9y ago

Thanks for the tip. Will check it out.

pmarreck 9y ago

That's awesome and I've added it to my toolchain. But I can't help but think that this is more a sign of how wart-filled Bash really is. Perhaps it's time for a new shell language that is less arcane, with fewer gotchas and simply less bug potential?

paulddraper 9y ago
Well there's dash, fsh, zsh, etc. Unless you mean something entirely different than POSIX shell family, e.g. Powershell, Python, Ruby, or JS.