This loop will only ever run once for a constant value. Did you perhaps mean to loop over dir/*
, $var
or $(cmd)
?
Problematic code:
for var in value
do
echo "$var"
done
Correct code:
Correct code depends on what you want to do.
To iterate over files in a directory, instead of for var in /my/dir
use:
for var in /my/dir/* ; do echo "$var"; done
To iterate over lines in a file or command output, use a while read loop instead:
mycommand | while IFS= read -r line; do echo "$line"; done
To iterate over words written to a command or function's stdout, instead of for var in myfunction
, use
for var in $(myfunction); do echo "$var"; done
To iterate over words in a variable, instead of for var in myvariable
, use
for var in $myvariable; do echo "$var"; done
Rationale:
ShellCheck has detected that your for loop iterates over a single, constant value. This is most likely a bug in your code, caused by you not expanding the value in the way you want.
You should make sure that whatever you loop over will expand into multiple words.
Exceptions
If you stylistically choose to use for
loops with a single element, e.g. to align with other code or to set up for future extensibility (for target in x86_64; do ..
), you can ignore this warning.