bashfactor

Hi, my name is Bashlund and I am a termie-holic.

Enough about me, let's talk about shell scripting and bashfactor !

Using bashfactor you can refactor source code straight from the terminal!

bashfactor was made originally to refactor TypeScript code from the terminal using bash scripting, but with minimal twiddling you should be able to refacator any compiled language using bashfactor.

How does bashfactor work

The secret sauce is that bashfactor captures the error output from the compiler and then runs sed to substitute old to new in the files where the compiler flagged errors.

Beautiful? Hacky as hell? Yes mam! That is why we love shell scripting! Beautiful hacks unite.

Is this really written in Bash?

No, no, this tool is written in the more primitive POSIX compliant shell dialect which runs under bash, dash and BusyBox shell.

How to use bashfactor

Clone the repo or just copy the file bashfactor and put in in your $PATH or wherever you want, and make sure the file is executable (chmod +x bashfactor).

1. First, make sure your project compiles without errors.
2. Second, make sure all code is committed.
3. Third, introduce an error by renaming the target variable/function/class where it is declared, this will result in compiler errors.
4. Now, run bashfactor to resolve those errors by renaming all other error occurrences for you.

You need to run bashfactor from the root directory of your project so that the relative filepath output from the compiler is valid, otherwise you will see an error like: sed: can't read src/components/....

bashfactor -i oldname newname

The -i flag is optional and brings up your editor to inspect and/or modify the list of files to substitute in.

By default bashfactor runs npx tsc to compile. This you can change as you wish either in the source file in the COMPILE function or you can override the setting using the BASHFACTOR_CMD env variable, as:

BASHFACTOR_CMD="npm run build" bashfactor -i oldname newname

If you happen to run your node and npm inside a container for isolation you can do this:

BASHFACTOR_CMD="docker exec -i mycontainer npx tsc" bashfactor -i oldname newname

Hint: See .bashfactor.rc further down.

Note that if running in a container and your compiler yields absolute filepaths instead of relative paths the substitution will not work. The easiest solution to this is to just run the bashfactor script from a shell inside the container.

If you switch to another language and compiler that error output might be in a different format and in such case you need to adjust the PARSE function in the script.

Bashfactor will run further substitution rounds automatically since other compilation error surface as some are fixed.

Warning

If you type the wrong name to be substituted, this will not resolve errors and bashfactor will therefore run forever. If this happens exit bashfactor, revert those changes using git and try again.

Example:

bashfactor -i oldname newNameWithTypo

Changing editor

The default editor bashfactor fires up is $EDITOR, then vim. You can set this as:

EDITOR=nano bashfactor -i oldname newname

.bashfactor.rc

If bashfactor detects the file .bashfactor.rc in the current working directory then that file is then sourced.

This can be useful for special configurations you might need to different projects which you do not want to supply on cmd line each time.

.bashfactor.rc:

BASHFACTOR_CMD="docker exec -i mycontainer npx tsc"

License

bashfactor (C) @bashlund 2024 MIT license.