Cram is a test framework for command line programs, originally written for mercurial's test suite.

I like the approach - it just reads a shell transcript and runs the commands it finds. If the output doesn't match, it shows you a diff. It's kind of like doctest.

It looks refreshingly simple to get started with, something that so many other test frameworks fail horribly at.

A while ago, I wrote something similar for work. After trying and failing to find a testing framework that wasn't over-engineered, I wrote a script that looks in ./test/, and runs every file named whatever.test, and compares output to files whatever.test.stdout and whatever.test.stderr, if they exist. If not, it just uses the return value to determine success.

I loved how easy it was to add a test. Just write a script! There is no step two.

(cram found via Titus Brown )

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