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It's unclear if you missed the filename being wrongfile.conf. Embedding a -- in the middle of a long series of arguments isn't the magic pixie dust that suddenl

It's unclear if you missed the filename being wrongfile.conf. Embedding a -- in the middle of a long series of arguments isn't the magic pixie dust that suddenly makes the filename argument stand out the way that it does when it's the very first argument in the pipe. Yes, I saw your other points, and I chose this example because it is an example drawn from real-world use where there is zero objective reason to wag a finger about "useless use of cat". Those other points are not relevant in this example, and piping a cat into some other commands into a while loop is pretty typical shellcode. Forcing me to move a filename argument into the middle of a long line for stylistic reasons should be obviously wrong. It is one case where shellcheck is over-reaching and being a nuisance rather than helping me catch errors. This has been argued better and to death already: https://stackoverflow.com/a/16619430 https://stackoverflow.com/a/16619430, http://oletange.blogspot.com/2013/10/useless-use-of-cat.html http://oletange.blogspot.com/2013/10/useless-use-of-cat.html, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23341711 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23341711, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36116208 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36116208, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6367319 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6367319, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1116085 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1116085, etc.

dataflow 3y ago
If you deliberately chose a specific example then you forgot what this discussion was about? You're giving an existence proof. Yes, there exist situations where it's fine. But this discussion was about what constitutes good habits, not about cherrypicked counterexamples. The whole point of paying attention to good and bad habits is that they sometimes make a difference, and if your habits are bad, you'll sometimes get yourself in trouble. And it's not like you can reasonably expect shellcheck to distinguish the benign cases from the potentially problematic ones either. It has to give you a recommendation about what constitutes good habits, and avoiding redundant calls to cat is a good habit for all the reasons I just listed, even if in some cherrypicked cases it provides ~no benefit.

dataflow 3y ago

If you deliberately chose a specific example then you forgot what this discussion was about? You're giving an existence proof. Yes, there exist situations where it's fine. But this discussion was about what constitutes good habits, not about cherrypicked counterexamples. The whole point of paying attention to good and bad habits is that they sometimes make a difference, and if your habits are bad, you'll sometimes get yourself in trouble. And it's not like you can reasonably expect shellcheck to distinguish the benign cases from the potentially problematic ones either. It has to give you a recommendation about what constitutes good habits, and avoiding redundant calls to cat is a good habit for all the reasons I just listed, even if in some cherrypicked cases it provides ~no benefit.