Beautiful Bash: Let's make reading and writing bash scripts fun again!

Beautiful Bash: A community driven eﬀort
Lets make reading & writing Bash scripts fun again!
Aaron Zauner
azet@azet.org
lambda.co.at:
Highly-Available, Scalable & Secure Distributed Systems
DevOps/Security Meetup Vienna - 17/12/2014

Introduction
Working towards a community style guide
Doing it wrong
Modern Bash scripting (Welcome to 2014!)
Conclusion

Caveat Emptor
I’m not endorsing Bash for large-scale projects, difficult or
performance critical tasks. If your project needs to talk to a
database, object store, interact with a filesystem or dynamically
handle block devices - you SHOULD NOT use Bash in the first
place. You can. But you’ll regret it - I speak from years of
experience doing completely insane stuff in Bash for fun (certainly
not for profit).
Bash is useful for one thing and one thing only: as glue!
..and it’s the glue that holds Linux distributions, Embedded
Appliances and even Commercial networking gear together - so you
better use the best glue on the market, right?
DevOps/Security Meetup Vienna - 17/12/2014 Beautiful Bash: A community driven effort
Aaron Zauner 1/30

Do we really need another style guide?
For starters: It’s not only a style guide, but more on that later.
A lot of the internet actually runs on poorly written Bash.
Your company probably depends on a lot of Bash-glue.
Everyone uses it on a daily basis to glue userland utilities
together.
Some scripts unintentionally look like they are submissions for
an obfuscated code contest.
There are some style guides (e.g. by Google) and tutorials -
but nothing deﬁnitive.
Most books on the subject are ancient and often reﬂect
personal opinions of authors, outdated Bash versions and
userland utilities and most haven’t been updated in decades.
I don’t know a single good book on Bash. The best resource is
still http://wiki.bash-hackers.org.
Aaron Zauner 2/30

Working towards a community style guide
I’ve started collecting style guides, tutorials, write-ups, tools
and debugging projects during the last couple of years.
..chose the best ideas and clearest styles and combined them
into one big community driven eﬀort.
People started contributing.
Nothing is written in stone. Come up with a better idea for a
certain topic and I’ll gladly accept it.
I’ve also included a lot of mistakes people do or even rely on
when writing their (often production) scripts.
I’ve also collected a lot of tricks and shortcuts I’ve learned over
the years speciﬁc to bash scripting and the Linux userland.
Aaron Zauner 3/30

Bad Example
Here’s a cool and bad example at the same time. rpm2cpio
reimplemented in bash.
As Debian package: Installed-Size: 1044
As Bash script: 4
Aaron Zauner 4/30

Bad Example (cont.)
https://trac.macports.org/attachment/ticket/33444/rpm2cpio
Aaron Zauner 5/30

Common bad style practices
overusing grep for tasks that Bash can do by itself.
using bourne-shell backticks instead of $() for subshell calls.
.. ever tried to nest backtick subshells? yea. you’ll have to
escape them. instead of e.g.:
$(util1 $(util2 ${some_variable_as_argument})).
manual argument parsing instead of using the getopts builtin.
using awk for arithmetic operations bash can do very well.
.. same goes for expr(1). please stop using it in bash scripts.
.. same goes for bc(1). please stop using it in bash scripts.
Aaron Zauner 6/30

Common bad style practices (cont.)
using the echo builtin where printf can (and probably
should) be used.
using seq 1 15 for range expressions instead of {1..15}
many coreutils you do not need & you save on subshell calls.
.. a lot is set as a variable in your environment already
(protip: see what env gives you to work with in the ﬁrst place)
worst of all: endless and unreadable pipe glue. . . . . . . . . . . .
Aaron Zauner 7/30

Common bad style practices (cont.)
So what is more readable to you and probably the angry sysadmin
that might take over your codebase at some point in time?
ls ${long_list_of_parameters} | grep ${foo} | grep -v
grep | pgrep | wc -l | sort | uniq
or
ls ${long_list_of_parameters}
| grep ${foo}
| grep -v grep
| pgrep
| wc -l
| sort
| uniq
Aaron Zauner 8/30

awk(1) for everything
But why?
$ du -sh Downloads | awk ‚{ print $1 }‚
366G
$ folder_size=($(du -sh Downloads))
$ echo ${folder_size[1]}
Downloads
$ echo ${folder_size[0]}
366G
Aaron Zauner 9/30

Aaron Zauner 10/30

Debugging is a mess
One of the reasons nobody should aim for big projects in Bash is
that it is terrible to debug, most of you will know this already.
This project aims to make it easier for you to debug your scripts.
By writing beautiful, solid and testable code.
Aaron Zauner 11/30

Modern Bash scripting
Most people don’t know that there are a lot of useful paradigms and
tools that are used for software engineering in serious languages
available also to Bash.
Let’s not kid ourselves: some Bash scripts will run in production,
even for years. They’d better work. And not take your business
oﬄine.
Aaron Zauner 12/30

Conventions
I’ve come up with a few conventions:
use #!/usr/bin/env bash
do not use TABs for (consistently use 2, 3 or 4 spaces)
but conditional and loop clauses on the same line:
if ..; then instead of
if ...
then
...
fi
there’re no private functions in Bash, RedHat has a convention
for that, prepend with two underscores function
__my_private_function()
as in Ruby, Python; don’t use indents in switch (case) blocks
always “escape” varabiles. Bad: $MyVar, Good: ${MyVar}.DevOps/Security Meetup Vienna - 17/12/2014 Beautiful Bash: A community driven eﬀort
Aaron Zauner 13/30

DocOpt
DocOpt is a Command-line interface description language with
support for all popular programming languages.
http://docopt.org/
https://github.com/docopt
..also for Bash
https://github.com/docopt/docopts
Aaron Zauner 14/30

Test Driven Development and Unit tests with Bash
#!/usr/bin/env bats
@test "addition using bc" {
result="$(echo 2+2 | bc)"
[ "$result" -eq 4 ]
}
@test "addition using dc" {
result="$(echo 2 2+p | dc)"
[ "$result" -eq 4 ]
}
. . .
Aaron Zauner 15/30

Test Driven Development and Unit tests with Bash (cont.)
1. Sam Stephenson (of rbenv fame) wrote an automated testing
system for Bash scripts called ‘bats’ using TAP (Test Anything
Protocol): https://github.com/sstephenson/bats
2. Sharness: another TAP library. there’s even a Chef cookbook
for it: https://github.com/mlafeldt/sharness
3. Cram: a functional testing framework based on Marcurial’s
uniﬁed test format - https://bitheap.org/cram/
4. rnt: Automated testing of commandline interfaces -
https://github.com/roman-neuhauser/rnt
5. shUnit2: is a xUnit framework (similar to PyUnit, JUnit et
cetera) - https://code.google.com/p/shunit2/
6. shpec: Tests/Specs - https://github.com/rylnd/shpec
..there are more, but these I’ve found to be most useful.
Aaron Zauner 16/30

Linting
A online Bash style linter:
https://github.com/koalaman/shellcheck
Ubuntu ships with a tool called checkbashisms based on
Debians lintian (portability).
shlint tests for portability between zsh, ksh, bash, dash and
bourne shell (if need be):
https://github.com/duggan/shlint
For Node fans: Grunt task that checks if a Bash script is valid
(not anything else, btw):
https://www.npmjs.com/package/grunt-lint-bash
Aaron Zauner 17/30

Inter-shell portability
Personal opinion:
Inter-shell portability doesn’t matter. I’ve spent years writing OS
agnostic bourne-shell scripts. Today every modern OS ships with a
reasonably recent version of Bash. These days Solaris (and FOSS
forks like SmartOS) ship even with a GNU userland. Use Bash.
I love zsh and it can do a lot more. I still use Bash for (semi-)
production scripts. They run basically everywhere when done right.
Aaron Zauner 18/30

Defensive Bash programming
As you would in every other language, write helper functions,
test these functions.
Set constants readonly.
Write concise, well deﬁned and tested functions for every
action.
Use the local keyword for function-local variables.
Prepend every function with the function keyword.
Return proper error codes and check for them.
Write unit tests.
Some people write a function main() as people would with
Python. So one can import and test ones main call as well.
Aaron Zauner 19/30

Defensive Bash programming (cont.)
function fail() {
local msg=${@}
# handle failure appropriately
cleanup && logger "my message to syslog"
echo "ERROR: ${msg}"
exit 1
}
et cetera
Aaron Zauner 20/30

function linux_distro() {
local releasefile=$(cat /etc/*release* 2> /dev/null)
case ${releasefile} in
*Debian*) printf "debiann" ;;
*Suse*) printf "slesn" ;;
*CentOS* | *RedHat*) printf "eln" ;;
*) return 1 ;;
esac
}
...
[[ $(linux_distro) ]] || fail "Unkown distribution!"
readonly linux_distro=$(linux_distro)
...
Aaron Zauner 21/30

function debian_version() {
# convert debian version to single unsigned integer
local dv=$(printf "%.f" $(</etc/debian_version))
printf "%u" ${dv}
}
Aaron Zauner 22/30

function is_empty() {
local var=${1}
[[ -z ${var} ]]
}
function is_file() {
local file=${1}
[[ -f ${file} ]]
}
function is_dir() {
local dir=${1}
[[ -d ${dir} ]]
}
Aaron Zauner 23/30

Signal Handling
Bash supports signal handling with the builtin trap:
# call the fail() function if one
# of these signals is caught by trap:
trap ‚fail "caught signal!"‚ HUP KILL QUIT
Aaron Zauner 24/30

Anonymous Functions (Lambdas)
You’ll probably never ever need this in Bash, but it’s possible:
function lambda() {
_f=${1} ; shift
function _l {
eval ${_f};
}
_l ${*} ; unset _l
}
Aaron Zauner 25/30

Bash Proﬁling
Sam Stephenson also wrote a proﬁler for Bash scripts:
https://github.com/sstephenson/bashprof
Aaron Zauner 26/30

Bash Debugging
Hopefully you’ll write code that you do not have to debug often, but
eventually you’ll have to. There’s only one real way to debug a
Bash script unfortunately:
bash -evx script.sh
or setting set -evx in your script directly
that being said, someone wrote a Bash debugger with gdb
command syntax: http://bashdb.sourceforge.net/
Aaron Zauner 27/30

Conclusion
There’s a lot more to tell (just ask me afterwards) - but this
was supposed to be a lightning talk.
All this, a lot of references and other projects are mentioned in
my Community Bash Style Guide which is on GitHub.
Please contribute in any way you can if you come up with
useful Bashisms, tricks or ﬁnd any cool projects.
Any input is very much appreciated!
Fork and open Pull Requests, Issues or Complaints!
https://github.com/azet/community_bash_style_guide
Aaron Zauner 28/30

Trivia: Do not try this at home
OOP in Bash:
https://github.com/tomas/skull
https://github.com/kristopolous/TickTick
https://code.google.com/p/object-oriented-bash/
https://github.com/patrickd-/ooengine
http://hipersayanx.blogspot.co.at/2012/12/
object-oriented-programming-in-bash.html
LISP Dialect implemented in Bash:
https://github.com/alandipert/gherkin
The original Macros used in the source of Bourne Shell (To make it
look like ALGOL68 - the author was a big fan):
http://research.swtch.com/shmacro
Aaron Zauner 29/30

Thanks for your patience. Are there any questions?
Twitter:
@a_z_e_t
E-Mail:
azet@azet.org
XMPP:
azet@jabber.ccc.de
GitHub:
https://github.com/azet
GPG Fingerprint:
7CB6 197E 385A 02DC 15D8 E223 E4DB 6492 FDB9 B5D5
[I have ECDSA (Brainpool) & EdDSA (Curve25519) subkeys as well.]
Aaron Zauner 30/30

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