What?!! Unit testing in BASH? You must be kidding!
I can hear you say. However, unit testing your BASH code is not only possible, but straight out useful when your code grows and you want to limit regression bugs while adding new features.
I've written a simple
BASH unit test library which you can use like this, following the
same construct of message, expected, actual parameters as JUnit uses:
source /path/to/bash_unit
assert_equals "The fruit is wrong" "apples" "oranges"
assert_equals "One and one is two" 2 $(( 1 + 2 ))
assert_equals "One and one is two" 2 "three"
bash_unit will output errors on the above tests:
FAILED: The fruit is wrong: Expected <apples>, but was <oranges>
FAILED: One and one is two: Expected <2>, but was <3>
FAILED: One and one is two: Expected <2>, but was <three>
As you can see,bash_unit supports strings and integers.
If you'd like to view the positives, you set the show_positives
variable to 1:
show_positives=1
assert_equals "The fruit is wrong" "apples" "apples"
assert_equals "One and one is two" 2 $(( 1 + 1 ))
assert_equals "One and one is two" 2 2
Which then produces:
PASSED: The fruit is wrong: Expected <apples> and got <apples>
PASSED: One and one is two: Expected <2> and got <2>
PASSED: One and one is two: Expected <2> and got <2>
Happy unit testing!
Note
After writing this library and living happily with it for a long time, I discovered shunit2 and have used it successfully the last couple of years.
