bats-core

Bats is a TAP‑compliant testing framework that runs on Bash 3.2 or newer. Test files are ordinary Bash scripts where each test case is defined with a `@test` header and implemented as a function; the framework executes the function with Bash’s `errexit` option so that every command must exit with status 0 for the test to pass. This simple, line‑by‑line assertion model lets developers verify the behavior of Bash scripts and any other Unix programs using standard shell commands.

The tool is aimed at developers who write shell scripts or command‑line utilities and need an automated way to validate their functionality during development or continuous integration. By producing TAP output, it can be consumed by CI systems and other TAP‑aware tools, and it provides a command‑line interface (`bin/bats`) for running individual test files or whole suites.

Bats is maintained as a community‑driven fork after the original repository became read‑only, and it includes documentation, issue tracking, and contribution guidelines hosted on GitHub. The project is released under the MIT license and is considered stable.