SC2066 – ShellCheck Wiki

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Since you double-quoted this, it will not word split, and the loop will only run once.

Problematic code:

for s in "$(mycommand)"; do echo "$s"; done

Correct code:

The correct code depends on your intention. Let's say you're in a directory with the files file.png and My cat.png, and you want to loop over a command that outputs (or variable that contains):

hello world
My *.png

Loop over each line without globbing (hello world, My *.png)

mycommand | while IFS= read -r s; do echo "$s"; done

Loop over each word with globbing (hello, world, My, file.png, My cat.png):

# relies on the fact that IFS by default contains space-tab-linefeed
for s in $(mycommand); do echo "$s"; done

Loop over each line with globbing (hello world, My cat.png)

# explicitly set IFS to contain only a line feed
IFS='
'
for s in $(mycommand); do echo "$s"; done

Rationale:

You get this warning because you have a loop that will only ever run exactly one iteration. Since you have a loop, you clearly expect it to run more than once. You just have to decide how it should be split up.

Exceptions

None.

ShellCheck is a static analysis tool for shell scripts. This page is part of its documentation.