Forgive me if there is a more appropriate forum for discussing this topic, but it wasn't obvious from a cursory glance at the web pages that there was one.
I was wondering if anyone has ever developed a module system for bash, similar to the system that Perl has. I have been been using a rudimentary, home-grown module system myself and I find it to be quite an effective way of developing, maintaining and distributing useful libraries of bash functions within the confines of a project team. The next logical step would be make the system truly scalable so that it was practical to import modules developed independently by third parties. I think bash is a particularly useful language to develop libraries of utility functions. In my view, it is superior to perl because it is a shell language - any constructs used in the shell can be used in the script library and vice versa without any impedance mismatch. The way I achieve this is to expose each function in the script library as an alias in the shell. The alias invokes the wrapper script that loads the script library and then dispatches a call to the function as the same name as the alias. In this way, all the functions of the script library are directly accessible from the command line allowing them to be composed at will in useful ways. This leads to a very functionally rich shell and minimal redundancy since function implementations can themselves re-use other functions in the library. My initial implementation has been a little too successful in that I have thousands of small functions in my library and load times are starting to become noticeable because I haven't paid enough attention to the scalability aspects of the module system. The next generation will fix this, but before I spend too much effort re-inventing the wheel, I'd be interested in learning of other efforts in this area. jon seymour.
