shellcheck: boosting the signal


I like code-validation tools, because I hate defects in my software and I know that there are lots of kinds of defects that are difficult for an unaided human brain to notice.
On my projects, I throw every code validater I can find at my code. Standbys are cppcheck for C code, pylint for Python, and go lint for Go code. I run these frequently – usually they’re either part of the “make check” I use to run regression tests, or part of the hook script run when I push changes to the public repository.
A few days ago I found another validator that I now really like: shellcheck Yes, it’s a lint/validator for shell scripts – and in retrospect shell, as spiky and irregular and suffused with multilevel quoting as it is, has needed something like this for a long time.
I haven’t done a lot of shell scripting in the last couple of decades. It’s not a good language for programming at larger orders of magnitude than 10 lines or so – too many tool dependencies, too difficult to track what’s going on. These problems are why Perl and later scripting language became important; if shell had scaled up better the space they occupy would have been shell code as far as they eye can see.
But sometimes you write a small script, and then it starts to grow, and you can end up in an awkward size range where it isn’t quite unmanageable enough to drive you to port it to (say) Python yet. I have some cases like this in the reposurgeon suite.
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