Bash and Test-Driven Development

Question

When writing more than a trivial script in bash, I often wonder how to make the code testable.

It is typically hard to write tests for bash code, due to the fact tha

Answer 1

You might want to take a look at cucumber/aruba. Did quite a nice job for me.

Additionally, you can stub just about everything you want by doing something like this:

#
# code.sh
#
some_function_calling_some_external_binary()
{
    if ! external_binary action_1; then
        # ...
    fi  

    if ! external_binary action_2; then
        # ...
    fi
}

#
# test.sh
#

# now for the test, simply stub your external binary:
external_binary()
{
    if [ "$@" = "action_1" ]; then
        # stub action_1

    elif [ "$@" = "action_2" ]; then
        # stub action_2

    else
        external_binary $@
    fi  
}