CJTaskrunner is not a shell

CJTaskrunner is not a shell, nor does it require a shell to run.

You cannot use shell-specific syntax in your task definitions in your cjtasks files. This includes:

• “globbing” - not supported by CJTaskrunner. Wildcard matching such as using the asterisk character (*) to indicate all the files in a directory or a question mark (?) to match a single character in a file name.
• “brace expansion” or “ranges” - not supported by CJTaskrunner. Such as a{1,2,3} or {1..3}
• “subshells” - not supported by CJTaskrunner. Running commands in an isolated process by using parentheses (cd /tmp && touch file.txt)
• “command substitution” - not supported by CJTaskrunner. Running a command and injecting its output in a command or string current_dir=$(pwd)
• “inline variable assignment” - setting an environment variable for the duration of a command NODE_ENV=production node app.js.
• “pipes” - not supported.
• “redirects” - Bash features that redirect standard output using > or < are not supported.
• “command chaining” - Symbols such as && or || are bash features and not supported. But command chaining can be achieved using @and, @or and @if
• “shell builtins” - are pretty rare in reality, but things like local, kill, eval, test are builtins for bash. However CJTaskrunner includes its own @echo, @cd, @mkdir and @cp directives.
• ~ “home-directory expansion” - This is not supported in path names.

CJTaskrunner can do some of these things using directives, however.

• Use @export to change an enviroment variable before running a command

• Capture the stdout of a command using @set:

The irony of the statement at the top of this page is that, like a shell, CJTaskrunner runs executables directly, supplying arguments. So you can always use env in your task if you really need to do the inline syntax:

mytask:
  env NODE_ENV=production node app.js

CJTaskrunner can run any commands that are discrete executables. Much of what you might think of as bash syntax may actually be a program.

And finally if you REALLY need to, you can use @shell to run things in your system shell. This will void your CJTaskrunner warranty however.