ShellCheck - A shell script static analysis tool

http://www.shellcheck.net

Copyright 2012-2014, Vidar 'koala_man' Holen Licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License, v3

The goals of ShellCheck are:

• To point out and clarify typical beginner's syntax issues, that causes a shell to give cryptic error messages.

• To point out and clarify typical intermediate level semantic problems, that causes a shell to behave strangely and counter-intuitively.

• To point out subtle caveats, corner cases and pitfalls, that may cause an advanced user's otherwise working script to fail under future circumstances.

ShellCheck is written in Haskell, and requires at least 1 GB of RAM to compile.

Installing

On systems with Cabal:

cabal update
cabal install shellcheck

On Arch Linux with community packages enabled:

pacman -S shellcheck

On OS X with homebrew:

brew install shellcheck

ShellCheck is also available as an online service:

http://www.shellcheck.net

Building with Cabal

This sections describes how to build ShellCheck from a source directory.

First, make sure cabal is installed. On Debian based distros:

apt-get install cabal-install

On Fedora:

yum install cabal-install

On Mac OS X with homebrew (http://brew.sh/):

brew install cabal-install

On Mac OS X with MacPorts (http://www.macports.org/):

port install hs-cabal-install

Let cabal update itself, in case your distro version is outdated:

$ cabal update
$ cabal install cabal-install

With cabal installed, cd to the ShellCheck source directory and:

$ cabal install

This will install ShellCheck to your ~/.cabal/bin directory.

Add the directory to your PATH (for bash, add this to your ~/.bashrc file):

export PATH=$HOME/.cabal/bin:$PATH

Verify that your PATH is set up correctly:

$ which shellcheck
~/.cabal/bin/shellcheck

Running tests

To run the unit test suite:

cabal configure --enable-tests
cabal build
cabal test

Happy ShellChecking!