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Bash Linting. Checking your scripts are nice and lint free

Continiuing on from my previous post on testing shell scripts with bats I have been looking for a linting solution for shell scripts. And I think I have found a nice one in shellcheck. Which is aviailble as both a website and a packge on debian.

It's really simple to run just give it your shell script as an argument and you get a nice set of comments on the style of your code. Here is the result of testing their test script.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
## Example of a broken script. Hit the Down Arrow button to ShellCheck it!
for f in $(ls *.m3u)
do
  grep -qi hq.*mp3 $f \
    && echo 'Playlist $f contains a HQ file in mp3 format'
done

Then run shellcheck foo.sh

In foo.sh line 3:
for f in $(ls *.m3u)
         ^-- SC2045: Iterating over ls output is fragile. Use globs.
              ^-- SC2035: Use ./*.m3u so names with dashes won't become options.


In foo.sh line 5:
  grep -qi hq.*mp3 $f \
           ^-- SC2062: Quote the grep pattern so the shell won't interpret it.
                   ^-- SC2086: Double quote to prevent globbing and word splitting.


In foo.sh line 6:
    && echo 'Playlist $f contains a HQ file in mp3 format'
            ^-- SC2016: Expressions don't expand in single quotes, use double quotes for that.

I have a simple makefile now that's just there mostly as a reminder of the testing that is aviailble for that script.

bats: *.bats
    bats *.bats

lint: your_script your_nextscript
    shellcheck your_script
    shellcheck your_nextscript

Next up is intergration with vim. I use the really nice syntastic vim plugin. Syntastic does automatic style checking on files as you save them and shows a set of errors. Installing it is simple. Install shellcheck, I use apt-get install shellcheck on Debian but you can use your favorite way on your OS. Then install the vim syntastic, again I use Vundle so adding Bundle scrooloose/syntastic to my .vimrc and then running BundleInstall in vim did the trick for me. Now when I write a shell script to disk vim will comment on my style.

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