Beautysh

This program takes upon itself the hard task of beautifying Bash scripts (yeesh). Processing Bash scripts is not trivial, they aren't like C or Java programs — they have a lot of ambiguous syntax, and (shudder) you can use keywords as variables. Years ago, while testing the first version of this program, I encountered this example:

done=3;echo done;done

Same name, but three distinct meanings (sigh). The Bash interpreter can sort out this perversity, but I decided not to try to recreate the Bash interpreter to beautify a script. This means there will be some border cases this Python program won't be able to process. But in tests with large Linux system Bash scripts, its error-free score was ~99%.

Installation

If you have pip set up you can do

pip install beautysh

or clone the repo and install:

git clone https://github.com/bemeurer/beautysh
cd beautysh
python setup.py install

Usage

You can call Beautysh from the command line such as

beautysh.py -f file1.sh file2.sh file3.sh

in which case it will beautify each one of the files.

Available flags are:

Flag	Short	Meaning	Usage
--files	-f	Files to beautify	-f foo.sh bar.sh
--indent-size	-i	Number of spaces to use as indentation	-i 4
--backup	-b	Create a backup file before beautifying	-b
--tab	-t	Use tabs instead of spaces	-t

You can use - as an argument to -f and beautysh will use stdin as it's source and stdout as it's sink

beautysh.py - < infile.sh > outfile.sh

You can also call beautysh as a module:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

from beautysh import Beautysh

[ ... ]

result,error = Beautysh().beautify_string(source)

As written, beautysh can beautify large numbers of Bash scripts when called from a variety of means,including a Bash script:

#!/bin/sh

for path in `find /path -name '*.sh'`
do
   beautysh.py -f $path
done

As well as the more obvious example:

$ beautysh.py -f *.sh

CAUTION: Because Beautysh overwrites all the files submitted to it, this could have disastrous consequences if the files include some of the increasingly common Bash scripts that have appended binary content (a regime where Beautysh has undefined behaviour ). So please — back up your files, and don't treat Beautysh as a harmless utility. Even if that is true most of the time.

Beautysh handles Bash here-docs with care(and there are probably some border cases it doesn't handle). The basic idea is that the originator knew what format he wanted in the here-doc, and a beautifier shouldn't try to outguess him. So Beautysh does all it can to pass along the here-doc content unchanged:

if true
then

   echo "Before here-doc"

   # Insert 2 lines in file, then save.
   #--------Begin here document-----------#
vi $TARGETFILE <<x23LimitStringx23
i
This is line 1 of the example file.
This is line 2 of the example file.
^[
ZZ
x23LimitStringx23
   #----------End here document-----------#

   echo "After here-doc"

fi

Special comments @formatter:off and @formatter:on are available to disable formatting around a block of statements.

# @formatter:off
command \
    --option1 \
        --option2 \
            --option3 \
# @formatter:on

This takes inspiration from the Eclipse feature.

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Originally written by Paul Lutus