Bash script to run tests

Question

I have a java project with unit tests that I am developing on a Linux system, so I made a bash script to run all my tests. I can't really get it to work though

#!/bin/bash
JUNITPATH="/usr/share/java/junit4-4.11.jar"
TESTCLASSES=$(find kai/modsogner_och_durin/testing/* | grep .class$)
EXT="class"
CLASSNAMES=${TESTCLASSES%.$EXT}
echo "BEFORE: $CLASSNAMES"
DOTS=$CLASSNAMES | tr '/' '.'
echo AFTER: $DOTS
java -cp .:$JUNITPATH org.junit.runner.JUnitCore $DOTS

The echo statements and the DOTS variable are obviously only for debugging purposes. My problem is that when I try to assign to DOTS, when I check DOTS it is empty.

echo AFTER: $DOTS

this prints an empty line, but the BEFORE: print prints the path perfectly. It seems like I am simply not very good with bash and am missing something very obvious, but I really can't get it to work. I did at least make sure that if I replace

DOTS=$CLASSNAMES | tr '/' '.'

with

echo $CLASSNAMES | tr '/' '.'

it prints the class names with dot separated packages as intended. So it seems like a syntax error.

I would strongly encourage you to use a pre-existing tool to run your tests, such as Maven. — Matt Ball
– Matt Ball, Commented Jan 12, 2015 at 17:31
these are junit test so you can use ant as well, can even have stop on failure then and use jacoco to get coverage reports — jgr208
– jgr208, Commented Jan 12, 2015 at 17:32
I heard about maven/ant and have been considering looking into it. Haven't gotten around though, partly because I am new to the whole unittest thing, but also because I wanted to learn how to actually do it myself before I let other software do it for me. This is just a pretty basic university course anyway, so I can afford to play around for now. Thanks for the tip though! — sara
– sara, Commented Jan 12, 2015 at 17:49
Ant doesn't really "do it for you" All it does it just runs the unit test like it would be ran. Only difference is its in an xml parsed file. — jgr208
– jgr208, Commented Jan 12, 2015 at 18:10

Thomas · Accepted Answer · 2015-01-12 17:31:57Z

3

Regular assignment like FOO=bar baz expects a string and assigns it to the variable; it will not run any commands.

What you want is command substitution, via $(...) (or the old-fashioned `...`):

DOTS=$(echo $CLASSNAMES | tr '/' '.')

But in this simple case, you can also use bash's parameter substitution with ${varname//pattern/replacement}:

DOTS=${CLASSNAMES//\//.}

answered Jan 12, 2015 at 17:31

Thomas

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1 Comment

sara Over a year ago

That did the trick! I used the bash substitution thingy. The keywords "parameter substitution" and "command substitutions" were really helpful also!

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