From Shell Script Wild West to Battle-Tested Dotfiles: A BATS Testing Breakthrough
· 3 min read
The Problem: Shell Scripts are the Wild West
For too long, shell scripts lived in the "wild west" of software development. You either drew your gun first and shot cleanly, or someone shot you first. There was no middle ground, no safety net, no way to know if your changes would break production until they already had.
Our dotfiles were no exception. A single wrong conditional statement could break shell loading for every developer, leaving them unable to work. The cost of mistakes was astronomical, and testing was... well, non-existent.