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-eq treats this as a variable. Use = to compare as string (or expand explicitly with $var)
Problematic code:
read -p "Continue? [y/n] " var
[ "$var" -eq "n" ] && exit 1
Correct code:
#read -p "Continue? [y/n] " var
[ "$var" = "n" ] && exit 1
Rationale:
ShellCheck found a string used as an argument to a numerical operator like -eq
, -ne
, -lt
, -ge
. Such strings will be treated as arithmetic expressions, meaning n
will refer to a variable $n
, and 24/12
will be evaluated into 2
.
In the problematic example, the intention was instead to compare "n"
as a string, so it should use the equivalent string operator instead, in this case =
.
Exceptions:
It is perfectly valid to use variables as operands. ShellCheck will not flag any value that is an unquoted variable name assigned in the script:
a=42; [[ "a" -eq 0 ]] # Flagged due to quotes
[[ b -eq 0 ]] # Flagged due to not being assigned
c=42; [[ c -eq 0 ]] # Not flagged
However, ShellCheck does not know whether you intended foo/bar
to be division or a file path.
If you intended to divide $foo
and $bar
, you can either make it explicit with [[ $((foo/bar)) -ge 0 ]]
, or simply ignore the warning.
Related resources:
- Help by adding links to BashFAQ, StackOverflow, man pages, POSIX, etc