I'll get a closer look at the code tomorrow, but maybe you can provide an answer in the meantime: how do you handle line numbers? Bash's LINENO is unreliable, contrary to Zsh's, see https://gist.github.com/pawamoy/cca35f0f5ccd56665d6421e9b2d2.... That's why I eventually gave up writing any profiling/tracing/debugging/coverage tool for Bash and moved to support these in Zsh instead. Unfortunately Zsh is missing a ZSH_XTRACEFD like Bash, but that's another story (never finished contributing one). Here's my own attempt at a shell profiler: https://github.com/shellm-org/profiler :)
tested it on this https://github.com/izabera/cube.bash/tree/timep
i ran `source /path/to/timep.bash; timep ./cube.bash "R U R' U' R' F R2 U' R' U' R U R' F'"`
without profiling https://i.imgur.com/JE93ony.png
with profiling there's a bunch of errors but overall it's ~300x slower https://i.imgur.com/qif7Qp3.png so i'm sceptical on all the efficiency claims
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I'm surprised there's been no discussion on this project.
A part of me thinks that if you have to profile a Bash script, it's a sign that you've surpassed its intended use case, and a proper programming language with all its modern tooling would be a saner way forward. But then again, that line is often blurry, and if the script has already grown in size, it might be a sunk cost to consider rewriting it, so I can see cases where this tool would come in handy.
I find it hard to believe that there is minimal overhead from the instrumentation, as the README claims. Surely the additional traps alone introduce an overhead, and tracking the elapsed time of each operation even more so. It would be interesting to know what the actual overhead is. Perhaps this is difficult to measure with a small script, whereas a larger one would show a greater difference.
The profile output is a bit difficult to parse at first glance, but I think I get it after a closer look.
In any case, this is some next-level wizardry. The amount of patience required to instrument Bash scripts must've been monumental. Kudos to you, Sir.
BTW, you're probably aware of it, but you might want to consider using Bats[1] for tests. I've found it helpful for small scripts.
EDIT: I took a look at `timep.bash`, and I may have nightmares tonight... Sweet, fancy Moses.
Also, I really don't like that it downloads and loads some random .so files, and base64-encoded blobs. I would personally not use this based on that alone, and you shouldn't assume that users will trust you. If this is required for correct functionality, have a separate well-documented step for users to download the required files manually. Or better yet: make their source visible as well, and have users compile them on their own.
[1]: https://bats-core.readthedocs.io/