=
if trying to assign a value (or for empty
string, use var=''
... ).# I want programs to show text in Dutch!
LANGUAGE= nl
# I want to run the nl command with English error messages!
LANGUAGE= nl
# I want programs to show text in Dutch!
LANGUAGE=nl
# I want to run the nl command with English error messages!
LANGUAGE='' nl
It's easy to think that LANGUAGE= nl
would assign
"nl"
to the variable LANGUAGE
. It doesn't.
Instead, it runs nl
(the "number lines" command) and
sets LANGUAGE
to an empty string in its environment.
Since trying to assign values this way is a common mistake,
ShellCheck warns about it and asks you to be explicit when assigning
empty strings (except for IFS
, due to the common
IFS= read ..
idiom).
If you're familiar with this behavior and feel that the explicit version is unnecessary, you can ignore it.
ShellCheck is a static analysis tool for shell scripts. This page is part of its documentation.