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

If you code a bash program large enough to require TDD, you are using the wrong language.

I suggest you to read my previous post on best practices in bash programming, you will probably find something useful to make your bash program testable, but my statement above stays.

Design patterns or best practices for shell scripts

Answer 2

take a look at Outthentic framework - it is designed to create scenarios which runs any Bash code and then analyze the stdout using formal DSL, it's pretty easy to build any Tdd/blackbox tests suite upon this tool.