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verify-markdown.sh reports success while scanning zero links #2416

Description

@woksin

Documentation/verify-markdown.sh reports success, but its link-checking step is checking nothing.

Observed while adding a page: the linkinator step prints

Successfully scanned 0 links

both before and after adding a page containing nine links, two of them new anchors. The lint step (259 files, 0 issues) works; the link step does not.

Why it matters

The documentation rules state that every link must resolve and that broken links fail review, and verify-markdown.sh is the mechanism that is supposed to enforce it. A check that reports success while scanning zero links is worse than no check — it produces a green result that a contributor and a reviewer both reasonably read as "the links are fine". Links were verified by hand for the page in question, which does not scale.

This is the same failure mode as a test suite that silently matches nothing: the signal and the absence of signal look identical.

Suggested direction

Find why linkinator resolves no files — most likely a glob or working-directory mismatch between the script and where the markdown actually lives — and fix it so the count is non-zero. Then add a guard: fail the script if the scanned-link count is zero, so the check cannot silently become a no-op again. A deliberately broken link in a scratch file is the cheapest way to prove the check works before trusting it.

Acceptance

verify-markdown.sh reports a non-zero scanned-link count on this repository; a deliberately broken internal link makes it fail; and the script fails rather than passes if it ever scans zero links again.

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