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ShellCheck

GPL-3.0 de-facto static analysis for shell scripts

DevOps / Tooling · GPL-3.0 · 40.2k

Reviewed 2026-09-14 · last push 2026-10-19 · repo checked 2026-10-19

What's Good

GPL-3.0. koalaman/shellcheck. Haskell CLI that finds quoting bugs, unused vars, and POSIX foot-guns; wiki-linked SC#### codes. Distro packages, editor integrations, and the paste-bin at shellcheck.net. Source github.com/koalaman/shellcheck.

The Catch

GPL-3.0 copyleft — fine as a laptop/CI CLI; read the license before you embed the analyzer into a proprietary product. Vs Hadolint (Dockerfile AST + ShellCheck on RUN): ShellCheck is *shell scripts*, not Dockerfiles. It is static analysis, not a runtime or a shell.

Verdict

GPL-3.0 shell linter. Free forever CLI; the copyleft is the loud license, not a seat tax.

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