A shell parser, formatter and interpreter. Supports POSIX Shell and Bash. Requires Go 1.7 or later.

go get -u github.com/mvdan/sh/cmd/shfmt

shfmt formats shell programs. It can use tabs or any number of spaces to indent. See canonical.sh for a quick look at its style.

You can feed it standard input, any number of files or any number of directories to recurse into. When recursing, it will operate on .sh and .bash files and ignore files starting with a period. It will also operate on files with no extension and a shell shebang.

shfmt -l -w script.sh

Use -i N to indent with a number of spaces instead of tabs.

Packages are available for Arch, Homebrew, NixOS and Void.

bash -n can be useful to check for syntax errors in shell scripts. However, shfmt >/dev/null can do a better job as it checks for invalid UTF-8 and does all parsing statically, including checking POSIX Shell validity:

 $ echo '${foo:1 2}' | bash -n
 $ echo '${foo:1 2}' | shfmt
1:9: not a valid arithmetic operator: 2
 $ echo 'foo=(1 2)' | bash --posix -n
 $ echo 'foo=(1 2)' | shfmt -p
1:5: arrays are a bash feature

go get -u github.com/mvdan/sh/cmd/gosh

Experimental shell executable using interp. Work in progress and unstable - the name and package path might change in the future too.

This project makes use of go-fuzz to find crashes and hangs in both the parser and the printer. To get started, run:

git checkout fuzz
./fuzz

• Bash index expressions must be an arithmetic expression or a single word. If you must use a string with spaces, quote it. This is because the static parser can't know whether the array is an associative array (string keys) since that depends on having called or not declare -A.

 $ echo '${array[spaced string]}' | shfmt
1:16: not a valid arithmetic operator: string

• $(( and (( ambiguity is not suported. Backtracking would greatly complicate the parser and make stream support - io.Reader - impossible. In practice, the POSIX spec recommends to space the operands if $( ( is meant.

 $ echo '$((foo); (bar))' | shfmt
1:1: reached ) without matching $(( with ))

• Some builtins like export, let and eval are parsed as keywords. This is to let the static parser parse them completely and build their AST better than just a slice of arguments.

• format-shell - Atom plugin for shfmt
• shell-format - VS Code plugin for shfmt