How To Install shfmt on Ubuntu
Posted on April 1, 2023 (Last modified on May 20, 2023 )
3 minutes • 450 words
Introduction
In this tutorial we learn how to install shfmt on Ubuntu.
What is shfmt
shfmt is:
shfmt is a shell formatter, parser, and interpreter. It supports POSIX Shell, Bash, and mksh.
shfmt’s default shell formatting was chosen to be consistent, common, and predictable. Some aspects of the format can be configured.
shfmt can also replace bash -n to check shell scripts for syntax errors and bashisms. It is more sophisticated and the output is friendly.
For Continuous Integration (CI) tests, one can use a variant where formatting changes are just shown as diffs.
Main features:
- List files whose formatting differs from shfmt’s.
- Print syntax tree to stdout as a typed JSON. This can be useful to analyze shell scripts.
- Minify the code to reduce its size.
- Error with a diff when the formatting differs.
- Recursively find all shell files and print the paths.
There are three methods to install shfmt on Ubuntu. We can use apt-get, apt and aptitude. In the following sections we will describe each method. You can choose one of them.
Install shfmt Using apt-get
Update apt database with apt-get using the following command.
sudo apt-get update
After updating apt database, We can install shfmt using apt-get by running the following command:
sudo apt-get -y install shfmt
Install shfmt Using apt
Update apt database with apt using the following command.
sudo apt update
After updating apt database, We can install shfmt using apt by running the following command:
sudo apt -y install shfmt
Install shfmt Using aptitude
If you want to follow this method, you might need to install aptitude first since aptitude is usually not installed by default on Ubuntu. Update apt database with aptitude using the following command.
sudo aptitude update
After updating apt database, We can install shfmt using aptitude by running the following command:
sudo aptitude -y install shfmt
How To Uninstall shfmt on Ubuntu
To uninstall only the shfmt package we can use the following command:
sudo apt-get remove shfmt
Uninstall shfmt And Its Dependencies
To uninstall shfmt and its dependencies that are no longer needed by Ubuntu, we can use the command below:
sudo apt-get -y autoremove shfmt
Remove shfmt Configurations and Data
To remove shfmt configuration and data from Ubuntu we can use the following command:
sudo apt-get -y purge shfmt
Remove shfmt configuration, data, and all of its dependencies
We can use the following command to remove shfmt configurations, data and all of its dependencies, we can use the following command:
sudo apt-get -y autoremove --purge shfmt
Dependencies
shfmt have the following dependencies:
References
Summary
In this tutorial we learn how to install shfmt package on Ubuntu using different package management tools: apt, apt-get and aptitude.