> If ShellCheck is spitting out lots of warnings, then it'd be worth changing your shell writing style to be more compliant with it.
Is just a very roundabout way of saying ‘If you get a lot of errors using shellcheck you are doing it wrong’, which may or may not be true, but it’d make anyone defensive.
You could be right - I certainly didn't intend my comment to be antagonistic.
My experience of ShellCheck is that you only get loads of warnings when you first start out using it and it finds all of your unquoted variables. Once you get more experienced with writing scripts and linting them with ShellCheck, the number of warnings should dramatically reduce, so it seems odd that an experienced script writer would be falling foul of ShellCheck being pedantic about what you're writing.
> ‘If you get a lot of errors using shellcheck you are doing it wrong’
I kind of agree with that, although a lot of ShellCheck's recommendations might not be strictly necessary (you may happen to know that a certain variable will never contain a space), it's such a good habit to get into.
> it seems odd that an experienced script writer would be falling foul of shellcheck being pedantic about what you're writing.
It's not simply being pedantic, it is wrong. Your writing gives the impression that the tool is infallible.
If I was new to writing shell scripts, shellcheck is clearly a wise choice. The language is loaded with footguns. But as someone who has been writing scripts for decades, I already know about all the footguns. My experience with shellcheck is that it mostly finds false positives that waste my time.
I do agree about ShellCheck being wrong sometimes - that's why I mentioned the method of disabling it for specific lines with a comment. When I first started using ShellCheck, it was highlighting lots of footguns that I wasn't aware of, but nowadays, it's very rare for it to spit a warning out at me - usually just for something like it not following a script or stating that a variable wasn't defined when it was.
I think the huge number of footguns is what makes BASH scripting fun.
Adopting any kind of quality assurance tool is implicitly buying into its "opinionated" worldview. Forfeiting one's autonomy for some person(s) notions of convention.
Rephrased: Using shellcheck is a signal to potential user's, per the Principal of Least Astonishment. No matter if either party doesn't particularly care for shellcheck; it's just a tool to get on the same page more quickly.
Yeah, there's that aspect to it as well. It's like using a coding convention - the reason behind the conventions may not be applicable for every time that you write a variable name, but I think they're good habits to get into.
e.g. I always put BASH variables in curly braces and double quotes which is often unnecessary (and more verbose), but it means that I don't trigger any ShellCheck warnings for them and it's easier to just type the extra characters than thinking about whether or not they'll actually make any difference.
> If ShellCheck is spitting out lots of warnings, then it'd be worth changing your shell writing style to be more compliant with it.
Is just a very roundabout way of saying ‘If you get a lot of errors using shellcheck you are doing it wrong’, which may or may not be true, but it’d make anyone defensive.