=pod

=head1 NAME

Lembas::Specification -- Technical specification for the Lembas syntax and commands

=head1 DESCRIPTION

This is the full specification for the current version of Lembas.  For
usage documentation, see the main L<Lembas> manual page.

=head1 SYNTAX

Whitespace is important.

=head2 LEMBAS COMMANDS

Any line starting at column 0 is interpreted as an internal Lembas
command, or a comment.  Note that output lines may also have non-space
characters at column 0 if they are "tagged".

=head3 COMMENTS

Comments start with a "#" on the first column of any line.

Lembas uses a shebang-like syntax to specify what program or
interpreter ought to be started to run commands or generate output.
For example:

  #!/bin/bash -r

starts a restricted shell interpreter.  Shebang lines must be the
first line of the Lembas script file, or they will be treated as
regular comments.  Shebangs are overridden by the L<Lembas>
constructor's C<shell> argument, if present.

=head3 COMMANDS

All Lembas commands match C<qr/\w+/>, and may take any number of
arguments depending on the command.  Lembas supports basic shell-like
quoting and quote escaping, through L<Text::ParseWords>' C<quotewords>
function.

See also the C<COMMANDS> section of this document, for a list of
currently supported commands and their parameters.

=head2 INPUT AND OUTPUT

Input and output lines start at column 4.

=head3 INPUT

Input lines start with a dollar sign and space.  They will be directly
passed on to the current interpreter, with an appended newline (the
current platform's "\n").

      $ export FOOTMPDIR=$(mktemp -d)
      $ cd $FOOTMPDIR

=head3 OUTPUT: LITERAL MATCHING

This is the default matching style.  Lines of text output by the
interpreter will be matched with C<eq> to lines of literal matching
output.  For example:

  # note that `cd' has no output
      $ cd /tmp
      $ pwd
      /tmp

Lembas strips any output of its final C<CRLF> (or just C<LF>) and ANSI
color escape characters, to increase readability.

=head3 OUTPUT: REGEX MATCHING

Regex matching output is differentiated from literal matching output
by the presence of a "re: " tag at column 0.  In a regex matching
output line, any Perl regex is allowed.  The matching test is done
under the effects of C<use re 'eval'>, so you can do tricky things
like

  package LembasWrap {
      # match hex changeset hashes
      our $hg_changeset_re = qr/[a-f0-9]{12}/;
  }
  eval {
      my $lembas = Lembas->new_from_test_spec(...);
      $lembas->run;
  }; ...

and in your Lembas script file:

  # Checking that everything looks good
      $ hg log
  re: changeset:   0:(??{${LembasWrap::hg_changeset_re}})
      tag:         tip
      user:        Fabrice Gabolde <fabrice.gabolde@gmail.com>
  re: date:        .*
      summary:     created repo and added a file
      

with delayed regex interpolation.

Like in literal matching, output lines are sanitized by removing line
endings and color.

=head1 COMMANDS

=head2 fastforward

  fastforward QUANTIFIER

Skip ahead until the next expected output matches.  Does not generate
a test.

This command works by trying output lines one by one against the next
match (literal or regex).  When they fail, the failed match is put
back into the command queue, and L<Test::Builder> history is rewritten
to pretend everything went fine.  Any L<Test::Builder> output during
this phase is suppressed.

When an output line finally matches the next test, Lembas exits
fastforwarding mode and outputs the results of the successful test as
if nothing had happened.

C<QUANTIFIER> has no use for the moment.

=head2 preamble

  preamble

This special command can only be used as the very first command in a
Lembas script.  It kickstarts Lembas into matching output (because
Lembas expects a command to generate output, it gets confused when
output is generated without a command).  You can use it to match
e.g. license and copyright information.

Because C<preamble> acts much like a regular input line, it generates
a "no output left unmatched" test.

=head2 wait_less_than

  wait_less_than VALUE UNIT

Start a timer; if some output does not arrive within a certain time,
report a failure and bail out from the test script (it is unlikely the
rest of the script is going to work anyway).  If some output does
arrive, report a success and kill the timer.

This uses C<alarm>, in case it is important for your test script to be
able to C<sleep>.

C<VALUE> may be any value.  C<UNIT> may be "second", "seconds",
"minute" or "minutes".

=head2 yield

  yield

The C<yield> command exits the Lembas loop mid-tests so that you can
perform some other tasks.  You can resume the Lembas tests by calling
the C<run> method again.

=head1 AUTHOR

Fabrice Gabolde <fabrice.gabolde@gmail.com>

=head1 COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright (C) 2013 by Fabrice Gabolde

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the same terms as Perl itself, either Perl version 5.10.0 or,
at your option, any later version of Perl 5 you may have available.

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