Preface

Author: $Author: paul $
Version: $Revision: 2373 $
Location: $URL: svn://code.campware.org/campcaster/trunk/campcaster/doc/developmentEnvironment/shellScriptConventions.html $

Scope

This document describes the shell script file conventions for the Campcaster project. See also the generic description of the file conventions in the Campcaster project.

Introduction

Shell scripts are text-based executable shell command files. As text based files, they should adhere to the generic text-based conventions.

Naming

Shell script files are named by the following rules:

there are no spaces in the file name
the file name begins with a lower case letter
for file names containing multiple words, each additional word begins with a capital letter
the extension of the file is .sh

For example, a file with a single-word name may be named like: single.sh, whereas a file with multiple word name would be like: multipleWordNameFile.sh.

Structure

Shell script files are partitioned by using the following 80 column wide partitioning comment:

#-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# This is the title of the partition
#-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The file has the following mandatory structure:

Reference to the shell
Header
Additional sections+

Reference to the shell

This is the mandatory reference to the shell executable each script has to begin with:

#!/bin/sh

Header

The header holds all information mandated by the generic guidelines, but starting with the shell comment character #. Note the 80 column wide partitioning delimiter enclosing the header.

#-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
#   Copyright (c) 2004 Media Development Loan Fund
#
#   This file is part of the Campcaster project.
#   https://www.campware.org/
#   To report bugs, send an e-mail to [email protected]
#
#   Campcaster is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
#   it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
#   the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
#   (at your option) any later version.
#
#   Campcaster is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
#   but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
#   MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
#   GNU General Public License for more details.
#
#   You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
#   along with Campcaster; if not, write to the Free Software
#   Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307  USA
#
#
#   Author   : $Author: paul $
#   Version  : $Revision: 2373 $
#   Location : $URL: svn://code.campware.org/campcaster/trunk/campcaster/doc/developmentEnvironment/shellScriptConventions.html $
#-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Additional sections

Additional sections contain the executing code of the script. Bigger parts of the script may be partitioned by the partitioning commend seen above.

Template

See a generic template for shell scripts. You may freely copy this template when starting to create a new document.