Color your world

My coworkers use many ad hoc or single-purpose scripts, things like: checking system status, wrappers for build systems, launching services locally, etc. My UNIX background tells me, "keep it simple, avoid output; Silence is Golden."

Somehow my younger colleagues aren't impressed.

So to avoid acting my age I started sprinkling color into my scripts, and it worked. Feedback was uniformly positive. And true to my UNIX roots, I provided command line flags to disable color.

Some lessons for budding BASHers:

1. Yes, experiment and learn, but be sure to do your research. The Internet has outstanding help for BASH.
2. Learn standard idioms (see below).
3. Don't overdo it. Color for summary lines and warnings have more impact when the rest of the text is plain.
4. Keep functions small, just as you would in other languages. BASH is a programming language with a command line, so keep your good habits when writing shell.
5. Collaborate, pair! This comes naturally to my fellows. Coding is more enjoyable, goes faster and has fewer bugs.

Idioms

Most of these idioms appear in testing with bash, a simple BASH BDD test framework I wrote for demonstration.

Process command-line flags

this=false
that=true
while getopts :htT-: opt
do
    [[ - == $opt ]] && opt="${OPTARG%%=*}" OPTARG="${OPTARG#*=}"
    case $opt in
    h | help ) print_help ; exit 0 ;;
    t | this ) this=true ;;
    T | no-that ) that=false ;;
    esac
done
shift $((OPTIND - 1))

Keep boolean toggles simple

run_faster=true

if $run_faster
then
    use_faster_algorithm "$@"
else
    use_more_correct_algorithm "$@"
fi

Simple coloring

pgreen="\e[32m"
pred="\e[31m"
preset="\e0m"

if $success
then
    echo -e "${pgreen}PASS${preset} $test_name"
else
    echo -e "${pred}FAIL${preset} $test_name - $failure_reason"
EOM
fi

Consistent exit codes

function check_it {
    local -r failed=$1
    local -r syntax_error=$2
    if $syntax_error
    then
        return 2
    elif $failed
    then
        return 1
    else
        return 0
    fi
}

Coda

There are many more idioms to learn, hopefully this taste catches your interest. I was careful to include others mixed in with these (what does local -r do?) to whet the appetite for research. Go try the BASH debugger sometime.

UPDATE: Fixed thinko. ANSI escape codes need to be handled by echo -e or printf, not sent directly via cat!