ShellCheck maxing out CPU/Memory when editing a bash script

[chrisfederico1]

Code editor

NVIM v0.8.3

Platform

arch

Version

I don't have an output I use Mason to download bashls

What steps will reproduce the bug?

I'm sorry if this has been asked and I'm new to this stuff so I apologize upfront . My setup is that I have neovim v0.8.3 in a lua configuration and I'm installing bash language server thru Mason . I have shellcheck-0.9.0-22 from arch repository locally . What happens recently is that I'm editing a bash shell script in neovim and CPU/Memory max out and I can't use my machine after that . Looking at HTOP shellcheck is the offending app that is doing this . I thought that shellcheck wasn't supposed to run unless I call it but after looking around bash language server is automatically launching it ? Right now I uninstalled shellcheck but do I lose anything while doing so ? I understand if this not a bug and its my misunderstanding so I apologize . I don't have a output for bash-language-server -v. Is there anything I can do ?

How often does it reproduce? Is there a required condition?

All I need to do is install shellcheck and edit a bash file . My CPU/Memory max out .

What is the expected behavior?

It shouldn't max out my resources.

What do you see instead?

system lockup . Can't do anything besides reboot .

Additional information

Anything you need I can give you to help :)

[JPenuchot]

Related issue: koalaman/shellcheck#2721

[marcusquinn]

If your ShellCheck CPU/memory issue is caused by the hardcoded --external-sources flag (especially on projects with .shellcheckrc containing source-path=SCRIPTDIR or similar), there's now a fix: #1376 (merged) adds a shellcheckExternalSources config option. Setting it to false omits --external-sources entirely.

VS Code:

{ "bashIde.shellcheckExternalSources": false }

Environment variable (any editor):

SHELLCHECK_EXTERNAL_SOURCES=false

LSP init param (Neovim, Helix, etc.):

{ "shellcheckExternalSources": false }

This was the root cause in our case — individual shellcheck processes were growing to 3-5 GB RSS due to exponential AST expansion from cross-sourcing scripts. Setting shellcheckExternalSources: false eliminated the problem completely. Available once a release is cut that includes this change.