bug#72756: Potential Bug/Vuln in test.c

[Philip Rowlands]

On Wed, 21 Aug 2024, at 18:29, Nathan Hays via GNU coreutils Bug Reports wrote:
> Test:
> ~~~bash
> testvar=''
> [ -n $testvar ]
> echo -n unquote exit $?
> [ -n "$testvar" ]
> echo -n quote exit $?
> [ -z $testvar ]
> echo -z unquote exit $?
> [ -z "$testvar" ]
> echo -z quote exit $?
> ~~~

For this code snippet, the shellcheck linter reports

[ -n $testvar ]
     ^------^ SC2070: -n doesn't work with unquoted arguments. Quote or use [[ 
]].
     ^------^ SC2086: Double quote to prevent globbing and word splitting.

Did you mean:
[ -n "$testvar" ]

For more information:
  https://www.shellcheck.net/wiki/SC2070 -- -n doesn't work with unquoted arg...



Cheers,
Phil