I wonder is there any program that can take a bash script as input and print out all bash commands it will run? A program that would unroll loops, expand environment variables and generally not perform any destructive action nor call any external binaries. It’s like a dry run of sorts.
Found this over on Stackoverflow
You could try running the script under Kornshell. When you execute a script with
ksh -D, it reads the commands and checks them for syntax, but doesn’t execute them. Combine that withset -xv, and you’ll print out the commands that will be executed.You can also use
set -nfor the same effect. Kornshell and BASH are fairly compatible with each other. If it’s a pure Bourne shell script, both Kornshell and BASH will execute it pretty much the same.You can also run
ksh -uwhich will cause unset shell variables to cause the script to fail. However, that wouldn’t have caught the catless cat of a nonexistent file. In that case, the shell variable was set. It was set to null.Of course, you could run the script under a restricted shell too, but that’s probably not going to uninstall the package.
That’s the best you can probably do.
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yeah i think a sandbox would be the best solution.
Depending on what script OP is trying to run it would be best to just “rebuild” the potentially affected part of your system inside a VM and see what happens.
This is great—I’ve somehow never noticed
set -nbefore. Very helpful.