gobash
is a set of functions that improve programming experience in
bash
(by providing collections, languages features, APIs, testing
package, command line flag parsing, etc.) without modifying the shell
interpreter(s). It works with any bash version (on Linux and Mac).
Parts of the API are matching those in Go.
For more information about gobash, see the main documentation page: http://gobash.org.
API documentation is available here.
If you love learning by example, take a look at the examples page. A quick demo of the very basic concepts using a toy example is available here.
We focused on a design that enables the following key features (discussed in more detail at gobash.org):
- Programming language features -
gobash
enables (via functions and files) definingstructs
andmethods
and instantiating "objects", e.g., example - Arguments and return values -
gobash
supports passing "objects" as arguments to functions and returning them as "out" arguments, e.g., example - Collections -
gobash
(usingstructs
) provides a flexible collections:List
s andMap
s (thus avoiding built-in structures when they are not sufficiently flexible or they are not available in old versions), e.g., example - Command line flag parsing -
gobash
introduces a set of functions for parsing command line flags (similar to those in other programming languages), e.g., example - Testing -
gobash
comes with a testing package, e.g., example - API -
gobash
provides a set of functions to support common tasks and abstractions, such as strings,Mutex
,Chan
, e.g., example
#!/bin/bash
# Import the library.
source /dev/stdin <<< "$(curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/EngineeringSoftware/gobash/main/hsabog 2>/dev/null)"
# Create a communication channel.
ch=$(Chan)
# Send a message (blocking call) in a sub process.
( lst=$(List 2 3 5); $ch send "$lst" ) &
# Receive the message (blocking call) in the main process.
lst=$($ch recv)
$lst to_string
# Output:
# [
# "2",
# "3",
# "5"
# ]
gobash
uses several bash builtins, GNU coreutils, and binaries
widely available on Unix. Although the repository keep changing, the
list probably includes jq
, sed
, grep
, awk
, date
.
gobash
was tested on Linux with the following bash versions:
gobash | bash 3 | bash 4 | bash 5 |
---|---|---|---|
1.0.1-dev | 3.2.57 | 4.4.18 | 5.0.17 |
We also test on Mac. Please see the CI runs for details and up-to-date information.
(gobash versions prior to 1 were internal releases. Once we stabilize API or someone starts using the library, we will make public releases.)
I would like to thank Ahmet Celik, Owolabi Legunsen, Darko Marinov, Pengyu Nie, and Aditya Thimmaiah for years of joint fun with bash. Also, I would like to thank Aleksandar Milicevic for his feedback on this project.
Feel free to get in touch if you have any comments: Milos Gligoric
<milos.gligoric@gmail.com>
.