19.7.4 How to use Valgrind with shell scripts

It is not desirable to apply valgrind to shell scripts or other non-binaries, because

• It is wasteful, and you usually don’t want to look for memory leaks in bash.
• On a bi-arch system, you may get an error message such as "valgrind: wrong executable class (eg. 32-bit instead of 64-bit)".

There are two ways to avoid this:

• Using the Automake parallel-tests feature, you can use the following instead:

  TEST_EXTENSIONS = .pl .sh
  LOG_COMPILER = $(LOG_VALGRIND)
  

  Then valgrind will only be used for the non-.sh and non-.pl tests.

  For old automake (before 1.11.3), you will need AUTOMAKE_OPTIONS = parallel-tests to enable the parallel test harness.

• You can make use of the build-aux/run-test script from Gnulib. Add these lines to your Makefile.am:

  LOG_COMPILER += $(SHELL) $(top_srcdir)/build-aux/run-test '$(LOG_VALGRIND)'
  

  Replace LOG_COMPILER with TESTS_ENVIRONMENT if you use the old serial test harness.

However, with this measure in place, binaries invoked through scripts will not be invoked under valgrind. This can be solved by defining environment variables in the TESTS_ENVIRONMENT variable that are then used by the shell scripts. For example, add the following:

TESTS_ENVIRONMENT = VALGRIND='$(LOG_VALGRIND)'

And then modify the shell scripts to invoke the binary prefixed with $VALGRIND.