Quick tip!

Scripts generated from G-expressions (such as using program-file or gexp->script) often need to be inspected and debugged. But, they are written to the store as a gibberish tangled ball of parentheses. Indent them using guix-scheme-mode in Emacs. guix-scheme-mode is part of Emacs-Guix.

If you’re not an Emacs user, you’re not entirely out of luck. You can use this guile one-liner:

cat /gnu/store/…-foo | guile -c '(use-modules (ice-9 pretty-print) (srfi srfi-171)) (port-transduce (tmap pretty-print) rcons read)'

UPDATE on 24 September, 2025: I fixed the guile one-liner to read all S-expressions, not just the first one.