ShellCheck is a tool that can be used to check the integrity of shell scripts, which can be very useful while developing shell scripts, as it may indicate where issues are within shell scripts. It works with different shells, such as Bash, and the Korn shell.

Visit www.shellcheck.net to get information about how to obtain the tool.

For Red Hat Enterprise Linux based systems (and its derivatives), it can simply be installed as follows:

# yum -y install epel-release
# yum install ShellCheck

Or on Fedora:

# dnf install ShellCheck

ShellCheck helps to identify potential issues with check scripts, and thus can be an important tool for shell script developers. Even if a shell script works fine, the ShellCheck tool can be used to identify potential improvements to shell scripts. Considering that UNIX Health Check software is completely written in shell scripts, it is a tool used by us quite a lot to aid in ensuring that our code is valid and correct.

To check a specific script, e.g. to check script test.sh, run:

# shellcheck test.sh

For more information about the use of ShellCheck, run:

# man shellcheck

If you use a bash shell script that does an ssh command within a while-loop, you may encounter that the ssh command will break out of the while-loop, and that the script doesn't complete all the intended ssh commands. An example of a script is below:

# cat hostsfile
server1
server2
# cat script
cat hostsfile | while read server ; do
        echo $server
        ssh $server uptime
done
# ./script
server1
 16:19:22 up 11 days, 22:30,  0 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.05

As you can see in the example above; the script should run a ssh command for all files in the file "hostsfile". Instead, it stops after the first one.

This can be very easily resolved, by adding the "-n" option for the ssh command, as follows:

# cat script
cat hostsfile | while read server ; do
        echo $server
        ssh -n $server uptime
done
# ./script
server1
 16:19:22 up 11 days, 22:30,  0 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.05
server2
 15:20:56 up 11 days, 22:32,  0 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00