bats test cases won't stop

[jzk]

I am newbie to bash shell programming. Just found this great tool thought give it a shot. one weird thing I met is when all the cases are done. It prints
"ok 1 xxxx
ok 2 xxx
ok 3 xxx"

and it just stops there. only ctrl+c can make it rest.

Some of cases are invoking shell scripts directly.
Would like to know is there anything need to know writing bash program so it can be tested by bats?
Thanks

[kernelp4nic]

Can you reproduce this behavior from outside bats? Calling your shellscripts directly from the command line?

[jzk]

nope, calling that script directly won't halt there. and weird thing is If I put invocation of that script in the second test case and make 1st and last one simple assertion. what happens is it prints ok 1, ok 2, and ok 3 and then pause there.

[jzk]

I just reproduced it with cleaner steps..
say I have an test cases like below

#!/usr/bin/env bats
@test "start Tomcat" {
  run bash -c "$TOMCAT_HOME/bin/catalina.sh start "
}

running $TOMCAT_HOME/bin/catalina.sh start directly from shell can return successfully.
But running this test case just hangs there after execution is done (Tomcat process is up and running already)

bats  --tap tomcat.bats
1..1
ok 1 start Tomcat

still trying to figure out what's wrong

[jzk]

Update:

I changed test cases to

#!/usr/bin/env bats
@test "start Tomcat" {
  run bash -ilc "$TOMCAT_HOME/bin/catalina.sh start "
}

Now it can exit successfully without hanging there. Anyone can explain this to me, thanks?

[mguillet]

I had a similar issue. I spend quite some time to figure out what was going on.

My setup is bit different but the test is the same: I'm trying to start a Java application leveraging a wrapper (http://wrapper.tanukisoftware.com/doc/english/download.jsp). This wrapper comes with a bash script to perform start, stop and restart operations on the java application.

I think this is related to a file descriptor not being closed. If you edit the bats bash file and transform the last line:

exec "$command" $count_flag $extended_syntax_flag "${filenames[@]}" | "$formatter"

to

 exec "$command" $count_flag $extended_syntax_flag "${filenames[@]}"

You'll loose the formatting but your test script will now exit successfully.

Bats is using the file descriptor 3, commands run by your test file will inherit this file descriptor (I think). If your catalina.sh script file is also using this file descriptor and/or transmit it to a process that stays alive, your bats file will not stop since the pipe to the bats formatter relates to non closed file descriptor. By the way, if you brutally kill Tomcat while your bats file is still running, bats will return successfully.

Sorry if this is not perfectly clear, I'm not an expert of these things and it's still a bit fuzzy to me.

Here is how I've solved it (applied to your example)

#!/usr/bin/env bats
@test "start Tomcat" {
  run bash -c "$TOMCAT_HOME/bin/catalina.sh start "  3>&-
}

The 3>&- closes the file descriptor 3 for the new bash your creating. One of your bash options -i or -l may have the same effect.

@sstephenson: do you think that bats should take care of closing file descriptor 3 (or not "transmitting it")?