BASH linter

There's a good linter for BASH called ShellCheck, it can be installed on Debian based systmes with:

# apt-get install shellcheck

You can then invoke it simply from the command line to get feedback on your shell script. The messages are colour coded to indicate their severity: green, yellow and red:

shellcheck

On the fly syntax checking in Emacs

It's easy getting on the fly linting of the BASH scripts you're working on by installing flycheck:

flycheck bash

M-xpackage-installflycheck

and enable it everwhere:

(setqglobal-flycheck-modet)

It will now pick up whatever linting tool you've installed for the current mode, e.g. shellcheck. For a list of all languages and linting tools it supports out of the box, have a look at this list .