beautysh 2.2.2

A Bash beautifier for the masses.

Beautysh 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) keywords can be used 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 just 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 many large Linux system Bash scripts, its error-free score was roughly 99%.

Installation

Simply run

pip install beautysh

or clone the repo and install:

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

Usage

Beautysh has three modes of operation:

1. If presented with a list of file names —

   beautysh.py file1.sh file2.sh file3.sh

   — for each file name, it will create a backup (i.e. file1.sh~) and overwrite the original file with a beautified replacement.

2. If given ‘-’ as a command-line argument, it will use stdin as its source and stdout as its sink:

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

3. If called as a module, it will behave itself and not execute its main() function:

   #!/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 … well, among other things, a Bash script:

#!/bin/sh

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

As well as the more obvious example:

    $ beautysh.py *.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's behavior is undefined). So
please — back up your files, and don't treat Beautysh as though it
is a harmless utility. That's only true most of the time.

Beautysh handles Bash here-docs very carefully (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

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Originally written by Paul Lutus