also re: BATS

Im aware of it, but have never ended up actually using it. Ive heard before the sentiment you imply - that its great for fairly simple script...but not so much for long and complicated scripts. And, well, the handful of bash projects that Ive developed enough to have the desire to add unit testing for are all range from "long and complicated" to "nightmare inducing" (lol).

Its on my "to try" list one day, but I have a sneaking suspicion that timep is not a good project to try out BATS for the first time on.