SC2185 – ShellCheck Wiki

Sitemap

Some finds don't have a default path. Specify . explicitly.

Problematic code:

find -type f

Correct code:

find . -type f

Rationale:

When not provided a search path, GNU and Busybox find will use a default path of ., the current directory.

On POSIX, macOS/OSX, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD, it will instead result in an error.

Explicitly specifying a path works across all implementations, and is therefore preferred.

Exceptions:

You will get a false positive if you concatenate a series of pre-path flags:

find -XLE .

In such cases, please either use find -X -L -E . or ignore the message.

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