Are there any shell (specifically bash or ksh) checkers that test shell scripts for style, best practices, naming conventions, etc? (Something like Lint for C, or Perl::Critic for Perl.)
I know with ksh you can do syntax checking by running ksh -n script.ksh but I was hoping for something more than just sytax checking - something that parses/analyzes the actual code?
I'm probably out of luck, but I guess it doesn't hurt to ask.
I found shellcheck: it tests for common errors in quoting and other things you overlook ("because it works").
The Debian and Ubuntu projects use a script checkbashisms, that looks for particular patterns that might indicate that someone is relying on /bin/sh being bash.
Beyond that, most shells have a -n option to parse and report errors. You could check your script against several different shells to make sure it uses only portable syntax:
for shell in zsh ksh bash dash sh
do
echo "Testing ${shell}"
${shell} -n my_script.sh
done
edit to add: Since writing this answer, shellcheck has been written, as suggested in a later answer. This does a much more thorough job of linting shell scripts than the previous suggestions.
I wrote shlint to wrap checkbashims and the other basic linting options available to shells presented in Brian's answer.
It's installable via rubygems (gem install shlint) as sort of a gag, really, but you only need perl (for checkbashims) and a POSIX compliant shell to interpret the shlint command itself. Should work out of the box on OSX and Ubuntu.
