Things like this make me nervous ...

My eyes….

@darrenrahnemoon You should quote all your variables:

mkdir -p "$ARTIFACT_DIR"

Also give yourself an explicit delete:

rm -rf "$ARTIFACT_DIR/*"

I'd also suggest using a `set -e`

This just begs for disaster.

Why does it even require a "force" flag at all?
That script was made by a stupid dingus

Quoting doesn't solve the problem at hand...

Check that artifact_dir is a non empty variable would be the best.

If [[ -z "${var}" ]]; then
printf "Variable is empty\n" >&2
exit 1
fi

Don't assume defaults, don't use misleading short argument syntax.

rm --preserve-root --recursive --force "${var}/*"

Will fail if rm is so old that preserve-root isn't existant or default... Much safer.

Last but not least.

Bash option erronexit / pipefail have _a_ lot of corner cases.

Check return codes explicitly, don't rely on the behaviour of bash options.

if ! rm ...; then
printf "rm failed\n" >&2
exit 1
fi

Isn't superfluous, rather the right way to handle things cause you then have a clear and safe exit handling.

Don't rely on bash options. They have a lot of nitpicky fuckity hidden, some stuff even version dependent. It's not fun to debug :)

export ARTIFACT_DIR=/

@aaronswartz it's a bash script

additionally run all your BASH scripts through https://www.shellcheck.net/

@aaronswartz it is a bash/shell script to deploy some code in a CI/CD pipeline. Yes it is basically executing terminal commands.

At least you can use shopts to avoid those empty/undeclared variables …

What is that?