Suggest putting continuation indicators at the start of the line

[l0b0]

For new checks and feature suggestions

• https://www.shellcheck.net/ (i.e. the latest commit) currently gives no useful warnings about this
• I searched through https://github.com/koalaman/shellcheck/issues and didn't find anything related

Here's a snippet that shows the problem:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
grep … | \
    sed … | \
    cut … || \
    echo …

Here's what shellcheck currently says:

No issues detected!

Here's what I wanted or expected to see:

Put continuation indicators at the start of the line:

grep … \
    | sed … \
    | cut … \
    || echo …

Rationale: It's easier to tell apart the various command separators if they are lined up and separate from other distracting syntax like \. Black does the same thing for Python.

[koalaman]

Check out shfmt which supports both styles (shfmt -bn for the latter), and auto-formats them better than ShellCheck could. For the most part, ShellCheck focuses on issues related to semantics and does not try to arbitrate style.