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by James Robertson.
Original Post: No Debuggers
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This amazes me. I've done a little bit of script programming. I think my longest was about 1000 lines along. Any *nix sysadmin knows that scripting is the glue that holds the system together. Today, I'm trying to debug a bunch of co-dependent scripts for FAI (Fully Automated Install). At one point I found myself thinking, I really need to just sit down and step through this and see what's going amiss where. I'd always used -x and echo statements to do quick-n-dirty debugging before.
What I discovered next, truly amazed me. As near as I can tell, there are no "stepping" or interactive debuggers for shell programming, at least for bash. If you know of one, please tell me. This amazes me. I mean, a sizeable amount of any Linux system hinges on scripts. There have been man-centuries invested in debuggers for the C language and friends, and we Smalltalkers usually like to jump on our very horse and brag that our debuggers are still better. But I don't even get to do that in this case. There just isn't one. Weird, the shell is just text intepreter. You'd think an interactive/controllable interpreter (which is all a debugger is) would have been all over the place, thrown together by college students all over the place.
Maybe the problem is this. There is a corncopea of *nix shells out there; they're usually put together by some bored grad student wanting his/her own shell. What we need is grad-grad students to put the debuggers together for these things. :)
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