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ICSE 2023
Sun 14 - Sat 20 May 2023 Melbourne, Australia
Wed 17 May 2023 15:00 - 15:07 at Level G - Plenary Room 1 - Code smells and clones Chair(s): Sigrid Eldh

The Bourne-again shell (Bash) is a prevalent scripting language for orchestrating shell commands and managing resources in Unix-like environments. It is one of the mainstream shell dialects that is available on most GNU Linux systems. However, the unique syntax and semantics of Bash could easily lead to unintended behaviors if carelessly used. Prior studies primarily focused on improving reliability of Bash scripts or facilitating writing Bash scripts; there is yet no empirical study on the characteristics of Bash programs written in reality, e.g., frequently used language features, common code smells and bugs.

In this paper, we perform a large-scale empirical study of Bash usage, based on analyses over one million open-source Bash scripts found in Github repositories. We identify and discuss which features and utilities of Bash are most often used. Using static analysis, we find that Bash scripts are often error prone, and the error-proneness has a moderately positive correlation with the size of the scripts. We also find that the most common problem areas concern quoting, resource management, command options, permissions, and error handling. We envision that these findings can be beneficial for learning Bash and future research that aims to improve shell and command-line productivity and reliability.

Wed 17 May

Displayed time zone: Hobart change

13:45 - 15:15
Code smells and clonesTechnical Track / Journal-First Papers / SEIP - Software Engineering in Practice at Level G - Plenary Room 1
Chair(s): Sigrid Eldh Ericsson AB, Mälardalen University, Carleton Unviersity
13:45
15m
Talk
Comparison and Evaluation of Clone Detection Techniques with Different Code Representations
Technical Track
Yuekun Wang University of Science and Technology of China, Yuhang Ye University of Science and Technology of China, Yueming Wu Nanyang Technological University, Weiwei Zhang University of Science and Technology of China, Yinxing Xue University of Science and Technology of China, Yang Liu Nanyang Technological University
14:00
15m
Talk
Learning Graph-based Code Representations for Source-level Functional Similarity Detection
Technical Track
Jiahao Liu National University of Singapore, Jun Zeng National University of Singapore, Xiang Wang University of Science and Technology of China, Zhenkai Liang National University of Singapore
14:15
15m
Talk
The Smelly Eight: An Empirical Study on the Prevalence of Code Smells in Quantum Computing
Technical Track
Qihong Chen University of California, Irvine, Rúben Câmara LASIGE and Department of Informatics are Faculdade Ciências Universidade de Lisboa,, José Campos University of Porto, Portugal, André Souto LaSiGE & FCUL, University of Lisbon, Iftekhar Ahmed University of California at Irvine
Pre-print
14:30
15m
Talk
An Empirical Comparison on the Results of Different Clone Detection Setups for C-based Projects
SEIP - Software Engineering in Practice
Yan Zhou Huawei, Jinfu Chen Centre for Software Excellence, Huawei, Canada, Yong Shi Huawei Technologies, Boyuan Chen Centre for Software Excellence, Huawei Canada, Zhen Ming (Jack) Jiang York University
14:45
7m
Talk
Developers’ perception matters: machine learning to detect developer-sensitive smells
Journal-First Papers
Daniel Oliveira PUC-Rio, Wesley Assunção Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria & Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Alessandro Garcia PUC-Rio, Baldoino Fonseca Federal University of Alagoas (UFAL), Márcio Ribeiro Federal University of Alagoas, Brazil
14:52
7m
Talk
Smells in system user interactive tests
Journal-First Papers
Renaud Rwemalika University of Luxembourg, Sarra Habchi Ubisoft, Mike Papadakis University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Yves Le Traon University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Marie-Claude Brasseur BGL BNP Paribas
15:00
7m
Talk
Bash in the Wild: Language Usage, Code Smells, and Bugs
Journal-First Papers
Yiwen Dong University of Waterloo, Zheyang Li University of Waterloo, Yongqiang Tian University of Waterloo, Chengnian Sun University of Waterloo, Michael W. Godfrey University of Waterloo, Canada, Mei Nagappan University of Waterloo
15:07
7m
Talk
1-to-1 or 1-to-n? Investigating the effect of function inlining on binary similarity analysis
Journal-First Papers
Ang Jia Xi'an Jiaotong University, Ming Fan Xi'an Jiaotong University, Wuxia Jin Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi Xu Xi'an Jiaotong University, Zhaohui Zhou Xi'an Jiaotong University, Qiyi Tang Tencent Security Keen Lab, Sen Nie Keen Security Lab, Tencent, Shi Wu Tencent Security Keen Lab, Ting Liu Xi'an Jiaotong University