For example, how could it know whether cat$foo should be cat"$foo", or whether the script actually relies on word splitting? It’s possible that $foo intentionally contains multiple paths.
Last time I used ShellCheck (yesterday funnily enough) I had written ports+=($(get_elixir_ports)) to split the input since get_elixir_ports returns a string of space separated ports. It worked exactly as intended, but ShellCheck still recommended to make the splitting explicit rather than implicit.
The ShellCheck docs recommended
IFS=" "read -r -a elixir_ports <<< "(get_elixir_ports)"
ports+=("${elixir_ports[@]}")
Last time I used ShellCheck (yesterday funnily enough) I had written
ports+=($(get_elixir_ports))to split the input sinceget_elixir_portsreturns a string of space separated ports. It worked exactly as intended, but ShellCheck still recommended to make the splitting explicit rather than implicit.The ShellCheck docs recommended
IFS=" " read -r -a elixir_ports <<< "(get_elixir_ports)" ports+=("${elixir_ports[@]}")