A novel approach to documenting command line tools written in shell-script.

Typically in Software development, documentation has a tendency to be perceived as being boring to do all fall behind the regular development process.

By keeping documentation tightly knit to the source code, we increase the likelihood of the documentation being up-to-date; For more advanced programming languages, there's already lots of good frameworks for this.

Shell-scripts prove to be an interesting domain in that aspect -- shell-scripts are typically expected to be portable across operating systems, shell language variants; There also, de facto, doesn't exist a single authoritative specification on how the "language"(s) actually works, and different vendors have over time implemented different functionality.

Three important factors are:

• portability (being able to run on a diverse set of operating systems and shell dialects)

• low dependency on external utilities (not assuming that specific tools are installed in the environment the script is being run in),

• as well as having a small footprint. (low SLOC for the framework itself)

By placing the documentation at the top of the file, it is the first thing a developer sees when opening up the script in the editor -- this will hopefully provide a "hint" as to update the documentation if details in the script change.

Also, by attempting to produce good-looking --help output, combined with dynamic features (such as default value variable expansion) we further hope that the developer in question will see the point in keeping the documentation always-up-to-date.

Compatability with various shells and operating systems are automatically tested and reports are published on the following Wiki page:

• Compatibility matrix

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming

Martin Kjellstrand [email protected]