The Shell Toolkit

The Shell Toolkit, or shtk for short, is an application toolkit for programmers writing POSIX-compliant shell scripts.

shtk provides a collection of reusable modules that work on a wide variety of operating systems and shell interpreters. These modules are all ready to be used by calling the provided shtk_import primitive and "compiling" the shell scripts into their final form using the shtk(1) utility.

shtk is purely written in the shell scripting language so there are no dependencies to be installed.

shtk is known to be compatible with at least bash, dash, pdksh and zsh, and continuous integration tests on Travis CI prove this to be the case. It is also true that shtk runs on other shells like the native /bin/sh interpreter of the BSD systems but, unfortunately, no assurances can be made in this regard by the continuous integration system due to Travis CI limitations

shtk is licensed under a liberal BSD 3-clause license. This is not an official Google product.

Download

The latest version of shtk is 1.7 and was released on February 17th, 2017.

Download: sthk-1.7.

See the release notes for information about the changes in this and all previous releases.

Installation

You are encouraged to install binary packages for your operating system wherever available:

• FreeBSD 10.0 and above: install the shtk package with pkg install shtk.

• NetBSD with pkgsrc: install the pkgsrc/devel/shtk package.

Should you want to build and install shtk from the source tree provided in this repository, follow the instructions in the INSTALL.md file.

Documentation

shtk is fully documented in manual pages, all of which are stored in the man subdirectory. Once you have built and installed shtk, simply type man 1 shtk to open the manual page for the shtk command-line utility and type man 3 shtk to open the introductory page to the API reference manual. The SEE ALSO sections will guide you through the rest of the documentation.

As a quick introduction, here are the modules supplied by shtk:

• bool: Utilities to manipulate boolean values.
• cleanup: Utilities to install "at-exit" handlers.
• cli: Utilities to implement clean and consistent command-line interfaces, including logging primitives.
• config: Configuration file parser.
• cvs: Utilities to interact with the CVS version control system.
• list: Utilities to manipulate lists represented as a collection of arguments.
• process: Utilities to execute external processes.
• unittest: Framework to implement unit- and integration-test test programs.
• version: Utilities to check the in-use version of shtk.

Support

Please use the shtk-discuss mailing list for any support inquiries.