I have been thinking about this for some time now. I think we should allow to parametrize this with a flag. There might be other formats as well.

Would you have any suggestions or hints on how to expose this as a flag?
I managed to find the relevant logic for the feature, but I'm not familiar with how flags cascade from the UI deep to this level :)

Would you have any suggestions or hints on how to expose this as a flag? I managed to find the relevant logic for the feature, but I'm not familiar with how flags cascade from the UI deep to this level :)

Well, the flags are passed on again and again from (libexec/bats-core/) bats to bats-exec-suite to bats-exec-file to bats-exec-test. The parsing code consists of large case statements at the beginning of the files. If I find the time, I'll get around to do this myself eventually.

@jbriales Do you have feedback about the naming?

• --file-reference-format/BATS_FILE_REFERENCE_FORMAT
• custom, comma_line, colon_separated, url_realpath

I also had to work around missing realpath on MacOS.

@jbriales Do you have feedback about the naming?

• --file-reference-format/BATS_FILE_REFERENCE_FORMAT
• custom, comma_line, colon_separated, url_realpath

Sweet! Naming is hard, but I think it's good like that :D
I wondered for a moment if uri vs url was more appropriate here. I thought general non-web file://-like URLs tended to be referred to more as URIs (vs URLs). But after checking online, I'm not so sure of the difference anymore :)

Also I would consider if calling it url/uri only, vs url_realpath. What's the current expected behavior wrt e.g. symlinks?
If we keep it simple and just return a full absolute path w/o taking further care for e.g. symlinks (as realpath does by default IIRC), then maybe just url (or url_abspath) would be more appropriate?

Okay, I renamed:

• --file-reference-format -> --line-reference-format
• BATS_FILE_REFERENCE_FORMAT -> BATS_LINE_REFERENCE_FORMAT
• colon_separeted -> colon
• url_realpath -> uri