Question

I have a Bourne Shell script that has several functions in it, and allows to be called in the following way:

my.sh <func_name> <param1> <param2>

Inside, func_name() will be called with param1 and param2.

I want to create a help function that would just list all available functions, even without parameters.

The question: how do I get a list of all function names in a script from inside the script?

I’d like to avoid having to parse it and look for function patterns. Too easy to get wrong.

Update: the code. Wanted my help() function be like main() – a function added to the code is added to the help automatically.

#!/bin/sh

# must work with "set -e"

foo ()
{
    echo foo: -$1-$2-$3-
    return 0
}

# only runs if there are parameters
# exits
main ()
{
    local cmd="$1"
    shift
    local rc=0
    $cmd "$@" || rc=$?
    exit $rc
}

if [[ "$*" ]]
then
    main "$@"
    die "how did we get here?"
fi

Answer 1

You can get a list of functions in your script by using the grep command on your own script. In order for this approach to work, you will need to structure your functions a certain way so grep can find them. Here is a sample:

$ cat my.sh
#!/bin/sh

function func1() # Short description
{
    echo func1 parameters: $1 $2
}

function func2() # Short description
{
    echo func2 parameters: $1 $2
}

function help() # Show a list of functions
{
    grep "^function" $0
}

if [ "_$1" = "_" ]; then
    help
else
    "$@"
fi

Here is an interactive demo:

$ my.sh 
function func1() # Short description
function func2() # Short description
function help() # Show a list of functions


$ my.sh help
function func1() # Short description
function func2() # Short description
function help() # Show a list of functions


$ my.sh func1 a b
func1 parameters: a b

$ my.sh func2 x y
func2 parameters: x y

If you have “private” function that you don’t want to show up in the help, then omit the “function” part:

my_private_function()
{
    # Do something
}