Working with TAP Output Files

Sometimes, you may want to run tests, and view the output in a nice human-readable way, but save the raw TAP files for later replay or analysis, or feeding into some other system in a CI build toolchain.

There are two ways to do this with tap: as a single file, or as many files.

All One: --output-file=<filename>

Specify -o<filename> or --output-file=<filename> to dump the entire test suite to a single file as raw TAP.

To parse this and spit out a report, you can pipe the single file into a new tap invocation. For example:

tap -o file.tap
cat file.tap | tap -

Multiple Files: --output-dir=<directory>

To create multiple smaller files, specify -d<dir> or --output-dir=<dir>. The resulting TAP files will be the name of the test file plus .tap, in otherwise the same directory structure.

You can then later load those into tap to print a report by executing them as if they were tests. For example:

# run tests, dump raw output to dir
tap -d output-dir
# run all the tap files in the dir, print a report
tap output-dir

Of course, you may also find these files useful in various other TAP-consuming tools.