4 ms·

Do you have any thoughts, or writings that you could point me to, regarding shell's parseability? For example, is it possible to parse a shell script without ru

• idank 13y ago
  Yes, you can parse without executing. I think shell is easier to parse than it seems, there are definitely some nuances that might be tricky to emulate, but I guess it's a matter of effort and how far you're willing to go. For syntax highlighting in IDEs, you probably don't need much, and maybe even a few regexs can get you close enough. I actually spent a considerable amount of time going over bash's parser [0], and also zsh's [1]. Bash uses lex/yacc with some custom code. zsh seems to have a custom written lexer/parser. Unfortunately none of them were written to be used as a library, as evident by global state, and a lot of hooks for prompts while parsing, etc. It might be possible to somehow make it work, but it seems like a lot of work to me. You might have an easier time looking at the parser I wrote, and extending that, or rewriting it in another language (as it's fairly small compared to the ones you find in shells). There's also libbash [2], haven't looked closely though. [0]: http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/bash.git/tree/parse.y http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/bash.git/tree/parse.y [1]: https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh/blob/master/Src/parse.c https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh/blob/master/Src/parse.c [2]: http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/libbash/ http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/libbash/