Metadata

ID: bash-code-quality/ambiguous-argument-concatenation

Language: Bash

Severity: Warning

Category: Code Style

Description

Putting literal text and a list expansion ($@ or ${name[@]}) inside the same double-quoted word is ambiguous: Bash concatenates the literal with only the first and last expanded words in a surprising way, so the resulting argv is hard to predict and easy to get wrong.

Prefer separate arguments, use $* when a single string is acceptable, or quote only the literal so the list expansion stands alone.

Non-Compliant Code Examples

#!/bin/bash
printf '%s\n' "Bad parameters: $@"
msg="$@tail"
echo "x ${v[@]}"
echo "${arr[@]}suffix"

Compliant Code Examples

#!/bin/bash
printf '%s\n' "$@"
printf '%s\n' "${files[@]}"
printf '%s\n' "Bad parameters: $*"
printf '%s\n' "Bad parameters: " "$@"