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Tracing Execution in Oil (xtrace)

Oil extends shell's set -x / xtrace mechanism to give you more visibility into your program's execution. It shows high-level program structure ("functions", eval) as well as runtime events (starting and stopping external processes).

Background

In shell, the $PS4 variable controls the prefix of each trace line. The default value is '+ ', which results in traces like this:

$ sh -x -c 'echo 1; echo 2'
+ echo 1
1
+ echo 2
2

What's Wrong With set -x?

• It shows only an argv array for commands. It doesn't tell you if the command is a builtin, shell function, or external binary, which is important for program comprehension (and performance).
• It doesn't show you which commands are run in which processes. Because processes have their own state, this is also crucial for understanding a shell program. (Example: does echo x | read mutate a variable?)
• It's missing other information, like when processes are started and stopped, the exit status, and when commands come from eval or source.
• Shell concurrency makes the trace incomprehensible. For example, partial lines can be interleaved.
• Most implementations don't show non-printable and whitespace characters in a coherent way.

Oil Enhancements

Oil solves these problems. Here's an example of tracing a builtin, a pipeline, then another builtin:

$ osh -O oil:basic -x -c 'set +e; ls | grep OOPS | wc -l; echo end'
. builtin set '+e'
> pipeline
  | part 103
    . 103 exec ls
  | part 104
    . 104 exec grep OOPS
  | command 105: wc -l
  ; process 103: status 0
  ; process 104: status 1
  ; process 105: status 0
< pipeline
. builtin echo end

• Builtins are shown with the builtin prefix.
• External commands are shown with the command prefix.
• Bare exec() calls are shown with the exec prefix.
• It shows synchronous shell constructs with indentation and the > and < characters. This includes the entire pipeline, as well as proc calls (not shown).
• It shows process starts and ends with the | and ; characters. These are asynchronous in general.
• It shows the exit status of every process, which is important for reasoning about failure.
• It annotates trace lines with the shell PID (when it's not the root PID).
• The argv arrays are quoted with QSN. This ensures that they show special characters unambiguously, and that take exactly one physical line.

Option Names

This functionality is enabled by the xtrace_rich option, but you should generally use the oil:basic option group. This group turns on xtrace_rich and turns off xtrace_details, which is equivalent to:

$ shopt --set xtrace_rich
$ shopt --unset xtrace_details

Variables for the Trace Line

In Oil, the default trace line prefix is:

$ PS4='${SHX_indent}${SHX_punct}${SHX_pid_str} '

• SHX_indent is affected by synchronous constructs like proc and eval, as well as new processes.
• SHX_pid_str is only set for child shell processes (to avoid redundancy). It has a space at the beginning like ' 123'.

SHX_punct is one of the following:

• + for legacy shell tracing (xtrace_details)
• . for builtin and exec
• > and < for internal, stack-based, synchronous constructs
  • proc, eval, and source, an entire pipeline, and the wait builtin
• | and ; for process start and wait
  • synchronous processes: subshell aka forkwait, command sub like $(date), simple commands (;)
  • async processes: fork (&), pipeline parts, process subs like <(sort left.txt), the process that writes a here doc

TODO: Cross-shell tracing

• SHX_descriptor is alias for BASH_XTRACEFD ?
• Inherited $SHX_indent and $SHX_pid_str

Other Useful Variables

These variables can enhance the traces.

• @BASH_SOURCE, @BASH_LINENO, @FUNCNAME, $LINENO
  • TODO: Add @SOURCE_NAMES as alias? LINE_NUMS?
• TODO: $SECONDS for timing

Parsing xtrace_rich Output

TODO

• It's concurrent, but lines are atomically written
• Specify a regular language?
• Coalesce by PID?