Re:Techniques I Use to Create a Great User Experience for Sh...
by xyzzy_plugh on Saturday September 14, 2024 @10:21AM
(#41539991)
> 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.
Re:Techniques I Use to Create a Great User Experience for Sh...
by ndsipa_pomu on Saturday September 14, 2024 @10:45AM
(#41540145)
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.
Re:Techniques I Use to Create a Great User Experience for Sh...
by Aeolun on Saturday September 14, 2024 @08:21PM
(#41544131)
> I think the huge number of footguns is what makes BASH scripting fun.
We have a completely different definition of fun.
I really only use bash when I need to chain a few commands. As soon as there is more complex logic I move to some programming language.
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.