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Documentation in your shell scripts using shellman

When I write a script, I like to have a -h, --help option to help me remember what it does and how it works. But I was never delighted to write this help text. Besides, when your script's options change, you have to update the help text.

I also always liked man pages, their search feature and their ability to scroll up and down and not leave any output in the console. But maintaining a man page is even more tedious than maintaining a help text.

This is why I thought of using documentation in shell scripts. So I wrote shellman.

Writing doc¤

Shellman can read special comments in your file. These special comments are the documentation of your script or library. They simply begin with two sharps instead of one:

# A normal comment.
## A documentation comment.

Also, to give a special meaning to your documentation, each documentation line can be tagged, just like you would do in doxygen documentation:

## \brief A brief description.
## \desc A long description.
## You can write many lines in this tag.

Using shellman¤

After reading and loading all the documentation written in a file, shellman will then be able to output it on stdout (on in another file) in different formats, such as text, man page or markdown.

shellman my_script.sh  # text output by default
man <(shellman --format man my_script.sh)
# Available formats for -f, --format option: text, man, markdown

Shellman also has a --check option that will not output anything, but instead check for written documentation in a file. A simple --check option will return 0 or 1, but display no warnings. Add a --warn option to print warnings on stderr. It will help you fix your documentation, or even do some linting and continuous integration on your scripts' documentation.

An example¤

Here is an example of how I write documentation in my scripts now:

#!/bin/bash

## \brief shell script debugger

## \desc Run a script in path with the -x bash option (and more).
## You should set the PS4 variable for better output.

## \env PS4
## Debugger prompt. This is the prefix that bash prepends
## to the current instruction when using -x option.

main() {
  case "$1" in

    ## \option -t, --test
    ## Read the script and warn for encountered syntax errors.
    ## Do not actually run the script.
    -t|--test) FLAGS=-n; shift ;;

    ## \option -v, --verbose
    ## Run the script with verbose option.
    -v|--verbose) FLAGS=-xv; shift ;;

    ## \option -n, --dry-run
    ## Options test and verbose combined. Validate the syntax
    ## and print the script to stdout.
    -n|--dry-run) FLAGS=-xvn; shift ;;

    ## \option -h, --help
    ## Print this help and exit.
    -h|--help) shellman "$0"; exit 0 ;;  # Here is the black magic!

    *) FLAGS=-x ;;

  esac
  SCRIPT=$1
  shift

  /bin/bash "${FLAGS}" "${SCRIPT}" "$@"
}

## \usage dbg [-tvn] SCRIPT
main "$@"

How it looks¤

The different outputs would be like the following.

Text¤

Usage: dbg [-tvn] SCRIPT

Run a script in path with the -x bash option (and more).
You should set the PS4 variable for better output.

Options:
  -t, --test
    Read the script and warn for encountered syntax errors.
    Do not actually run the script.

  -v, --verbose
    Run the script with verbose option.

  -n, --dry-run
    Options test and verbose combined. Validate the syntax
    and print the script to stdout.

  -h, --help
    Prints this help and exit.

Man¤

man output

Markdown¤

**dbg** - shell script debugger
# Usage
`dbg [-tvn] SCRIPT`  

Run a script in path with the -x bash option (and more).
You should set the PS4 variable for better output.

# Options
- `-t, --test`:
  Read the script and warn for encountered syntax errors.
Do not actually run the script.
- `-v, --verbose`:
  Run the script with verbose option.
- `-n, --dry-run`:
  Options test and verbose combined. Validate the syntax
and print the script to stdout.
- `-h, --help`:
  Prints this help and exit.

# Environment variables
- `PS4`:
  Debugger prompt. This is the prefix that bash prepends to
the current instruction when using -x option.

... which would look like:

markdown output

More¤

Shellman supports more tags, in particular: function tags. See its documentation.

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