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Vidar Holen edited this page Jun 16, 2018 · 1 revision

This & terminates the command. Escape it or add space after & to silence.

Problematic code:

curl https://www.google.com/search?q=cats&tbm=isch

Correct code:

curl "https://www.google.com/search?q=cats&tbm=isch"

Rationale:

An unescaped and unquoted & terminates the command, but here it's used in the middle of what would otherwise be a shell word. This most commonly happens when copying a URL with query string parameters without escaping the &.

Either quote or escape the & if you wanted it as a literal ampersand, or add a space after it to make it easier to see where the previous command stopped.

Exceptions:

If you do want to background one command and run another, e.g. sleep 10&wait, just add a space or linefeed after the & to make this more obvious: sleep 10& wait

This does not change the meaning of the script, it just makes it clear to ShellCheck (and other humans) that the & isn't supposed to be a part of the shell world.

Related resources:

  • Help by adding links to BashFAQ, StackOverflow, man pages, POSIX, etc!

ShellCheck

Each individual ShellCheck warning has its own wiki page like SC1000. Use GitHub Wiki's "Pages" feature guerraart8 to find a specific , or see Checks.

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