How to or should we test scripts?
bitkidoku
We have a system that has some bash scripts running besides Java code.
Since we are trying to "Test Everything That Could Possibly Break" and
those bash scripts may break, we want to test them. The problem is it
is hard to test the scripts.
I would like to hear if anyone has experience on testing bash scripts.
Or should we quit using bash scripts and look for alternative
solutions that are testable?
Thank you for your answers.
John Roth
It's been a long time since I did any shell scripting, but IIRC it's
possible to import (include, whatever) a procedure (function, whatever
it's named) from an external file. That's the key to writing a testing
script: you break up your script into independent procedures that can
then be imported into both your running script and your testing
script, and then you have your running script be as simple as
possible.
John Roth
Andrew
I have justed to get into this territory. The first thing that was
said when I said "How do I test this shellscript then?" was "It is a
shellscript so it is not portable and wont even execute properly on
windoze". Our build has to work on unix (various flavours) and
windoze. So we converted the scripts to python. This felt like quite a
nuisance at the time but python does come with a unit testing
framework similar to junit, cppunit etc etc. Writing such unit tests
was useful during development but we have not yet managed to find a
neat way of getting these unit tests run automatically during the
continuous integration build.
Regards,
Andrew Marlow