Shellcheck and zsh

The sad news is that the shellcheck binary does not really know how to deal with zsh scripts:

% shellcheck script.zsh

In script.zsh line 1:
#!/bin/zsh
^-- SC1071: ShellCheck only supports sh/bash/dash/ksh scripts. Sorry!

You can force shellcheck to interpret a zsh script with the --shell option:

% shellcheck --shell=bash dirlist.sh

This might show errors, such as Quote to prevent word splitting/globbing which aren’t really errors in zsh so its usefulness will be limited.

If you want a specific script to be always interpreted as a bash script by shellcheck you can also add this line:

# shellcheck shell=bash

in the script, right after the shebang line.

This can be useful if you use zsh in bash emulation mode with

emulate -LR bash

Published by

ab

Mac Admin, Consultant, and Author