BASH – [: too many arguments

I’ve been writing a little bash script to wrap up the functionality in the JIRA CLI, and i’d noticed that sometimes, my script was spitting out the following error:

sh.exe": [: too many arguments

The code in question was:

j () {
if [ -z $3 ]; then
echo jira --action progressIssue --issue "$1" --step "$2";
...
...

It turns out the problem was that the variable $3 in the second line was being substituted directly into the if statement, without being quote delimited. So Bash is treating any input in $3 with spaces as multiple arguments (hence the “too many arguments” error). Duh.

Solution is to quote the $3 variable in the conditional to treat it as a single argument. Shouldn’t make this mistake again…