Function Trace

ajcannon · October 4, 2007, 10:26am

Does anyone know if there is a util out there to run through a shell script and be able to trace the function call tree. I have inherited some code and the original author was ****mad**** keen on functions - even ones called only once!
If anyone knows of anything I would appreciate it - web trawling has not revealed anything yet.

porter · October 4, 2007, 1:04pm

You could not do this 100% because a function can be called by name from a variable.

A good clue, however, is that a function has to be defined before it can be called, so if you look through the file in order it should be basically in bottom up order.

drl · October 4, 2007, 11:44pm

Hi.

You may be able to build something on your own -- see below, among the 300K hits found by Google "bash trap trace" ... cheers, drl

# Bash includes the caller builtin, which displays the context of any active subroutine call (a shell function or a script executed with the . or source builtins). This supports the bash debugger.
# The trap builtin (see section 4.1 Bourne Shell Builtins) allows a DEBUG pseudo-signal specification, similar to EXIT. Commands specified with a DEBUG trap are executed before every simple command, for command, case command, select command, every arithmetic for command, and before the first command executes in a shell function. The DEBUG trap is not inherited by shell functions unless the function has been given the trace attribute or the functrace option has been enabled using the shopt builtin. The extdebug shell option has additional effects on the DEBUG trap.

-- excerpt from bash differences

ajcannon · October 5, 2007, 3:55am

Thanks for the pointers

cheers all