NAME

shtk —

Application Programming Interface (API) of the Shell Toolkit

DESCRIPTION

The Shell Toolkit, or shtk for short, is a collection of modules written in sh(1) that provide common functionality to simplify the implementation of complex shell scripts. This page provides an introduction to writing scripts using shtk and serves as a reference to all the provided modules by it.

Script structure

Scripts using shtk follow this structure:

shtk_import module1
shtk_import moduleN

# possibly define globals here

some_custom_function() {
    local arg1="${1}"; shift
    local arg2="${1}"; shift

    # do something
}

main() {
    # program entry point; automatically invoked
}

In particular, note: that there is no shebang line at the beginning of the script; that there is no explicit call to main; and that there is no code outside of shell functions other than for calls to shtk_import(3).

Script compilation

The shtk(1) tool offers a compilation process for scripts using shtk(3). In this context, compilation just refers to the addition of initialization boilerplate code to the script so that the correct modules can be located and that a well-known shell interpreter is used.

Modules

The shtk_import(3) function depicted above is used to bring the specified modules into the script. For details on all existing modules, see the list of cross-referenced pages in the SEE ALSO section below.

AUTHORS

The shtk package was developed by Julio Merino ⟨jmmv@google.com⟩.