I have a large collection of command line utilities that are we write ourselves and use frequently. At the moment testing them is very cumbersome and consequently we don't do as much testing as we aught to.
I am wondering if anyone can suggest good techniques or tools for doing a good job of this kind of thing.
Edit: to clarify this is UNIX
Thanks in advance. Tom
You should be able to call them from a shell script (batch file, on MS operating systems), redirect the output to a file, then scan the file programmatically to ensure that it has the correct output. I'm not aware of a testing framework that automates this for you, but it should be fairly straight forward to set it up yourself.
You can do this from a batch file oder windows scripting host.
But i promise to use a task scheduler like (http://www.splinterware.com/products/wincron.htm) or other free/professional software.
There you can easy copy/paste the commandline-parameters which you should vary on, when you wanna test your software for about many 100 times?!
I recommend structuring your command line tool's code so that the command line utility is a client to a library of functions and/or classes.
Rather than simply using std::cout to print output, have the libraries function take an ostream reference that defaults to std::cout. When you are testing, provide a std::stringstream to collect the output.
Finally, simply compare your utility's output with expected results using your favorite unit testing framework.
(I apologize for the C++ specific example... I'm sure there are ways to do similar things in other languages too).