koalaman / shellcheck Public
SC2143
Joachim Ansorg edited this page Nov 12, 2021
·
6 revisions
Use grep -q instead of comparing output with [ -n .. ].
Problematic code:
if [ "$(find . | grep 'IMG[0-9]')" ]
then
echo "Images found"
fiCorrect code:
if find . | grep -q 'IMG[0-9]'
then
echo "Images found"
fiRationale:
The problematic code has to iterate the entire directory and read all matching lines into memory before making a decision.
The correct code is cleaner and stops at the first matching line, avoiding both iterating the rest of the directory and reading data into memory.
Exceptions
The pipefail bash option may interfere with this rewrite, since the if will now in effect be evaluating the statuses of all commands instead of just the last one. Be careful using them together.