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koalaman edited this page Mar 2, 2014 · 5 revisions

Note that c* does not mean "c followed by anything" in regex.

Problematic code:

grep 'foo*'

when wanting to match food and foosball, but not mofo or keyfob.

Correct code:

grep '^foo' 

Rationale:

As a glob, foo* means "Any string starting with foo", e.g. food and foosball.

As a regular expression, "foo*" means "f followed by 1 or more o's, anywhere", e.g. "mofo" or "keyfob".

This construct is way more common as a glob than as a regex, so ShellCheck notifies you about it.

Contraindications

If you're aware of the above, you can ignore this message. If you'd like shellcheck to be quiet, use a directive or 'fo[o]*'.

ShellCheck

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

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