Advent 2019 part 14, Why did the Clojurist drop out of school?

This post is part of Advent of Parens 2019, my attempt to publish one blog post a day during the 24 days of the advent.

Because they didn’t like classes.

Almost missed today’s post, so I’ll keep it short.

It’s fairly well known that you can put set -e at the top of a shell script to exit the script when a command returns a non-zero exit status. What isn’t as widely known is that set -x will cause every command to be printed out, so you get a trace of what the script is doing.

And what is not nearly as widely known as it should be is that you can also execute bash -x some_script to run that script with tracing on. Curious what the clj / clojure scripts do exactly? Then try this:

bash -x `which clojure`

What’s great about this is that any environment variables get expanded, so you really get the exact commands that are executed, and you can copy and tweak and re-run them as you like.

That’s it, see you tomorrow!

Hi, my name is Arne (aka @plexus) and I consult companies and teams about application architecture, development process, tooling and testing. I collaborate with other talented people under the banner Gaiwan. If you like to have a chat about how we could help you with your project then please get in touch!