Subject: Re: [RFC] Add basic syntax check on shell scripts

From: Stefano Lattarini <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 02 Dec 2012 15:30:02 +0100

On 12/02/2012 02:17 PM, Torsten Bögershausen wrote:
> The test suite needs to be run on different platforms.
> As it may be difficult for contributors to catch syntax
> which work on GNU/linux, but is unportable, make a quick check
> for the most common problems.
> "sed -i", "echo -n" or "array in shell scripts"
> This list is not complete, and may need to be extended
> 
> Signed-off-by: Torsten Bögershausen <[email-masked]>
> ---
> We add 1 second test execution time
> Is this a useful idea at all?
> 
FWIW, I think such an idea is useful (and also easy to implement,
so another +1 from me).

>  t/t99999-syntax-check.sh | 28 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>  1 file changed, 28 insertions(+)
>  create mode 100755 t/t99999-syntax-check.sh
> 
> diff --git a/t/t99999-syntax-check.sh b/t/t99999-syntax-check.sh
> new file mode 100755
> index 0000000..c4a9289
> --- /dev/null
> +++ b/t/t99999-syntax-check.sh
> @@ -0,0 +1,28 @@
> +#!/bin/sh
> +
> +test_description='Basic check if shell syntax is portable'
> +
> +. ./test-lib.sh
> +
> +
> +test_expect_success 'No arrays in shell scripts' '
> +	>expected &&
> +	(grep -i -n "^[	 ]*declare[	 ][	 ]*" ../*.sh ../../git-* >actual 2>&1 || : ) &&
>
Here I'd simply use:

    ! grep -n "^declare[	 ][	 ]*" ../*.sh ../../*.sh

And similarly for the tests below.

In addition, the globs above still miss some files ('perf/perf-lib.sh'
and 'valgrind/analyze.sh', for example); so we might want to improve
it, using, say, "git ls-files" (or find(1), in case the test is to be
run also from distribution tarballs).

HTH,
  Stefano