Integrating with the OS¶
- how to redirect output
- executing OS commands from within
cmd2
- editors
- paging
- exit codes
- Automation and calling cmd2 from other CLI/CLU tools via commands at invocation and quit
Invoking With Arguments¶
Typically you would invoke a cmd2
program by typing:
$ python mycmd2program.py
or:
$ mycmd2program.py
Either of these methods will launch your program and enter the cmd2
command
loop, which allows the user to enter commands, which are then executed by your
program.
You may want to execute commands in your program without prompting the user for
any input. There are several ways you might accomplish this task. The easiest
one is to pipe commands and their arguments into your program via standard
input. You don’t need to do anything to your program in order to use this
technique. Here’s a demonstration using the examples/example.py
included in
the source code of cmd2
:
$ echo "speak -p some words" | python examples/example.py
omesay ordsway
Using this same approach you could create a text file containing the commands
you would like to run, one command per line in the file. Say your file was
called somecmds.txt
. To run the commands in the text file using your
cmd2
program (from a Windows command prompt):
c:\cmd2> type somecmds.txt | python.exe examples/example.py
omesay ordsway
By default, cmd2
programs also look for commands pass as arguments from the
operating system shell, and execute those commands before entering the command
loop:
$ python examples/example.py help
Documented commands (type help <topic>):
========================================
alias help macro orate quit run_script set shortcuts
edit history mumble py run_pyscript say shell speak
(Cmd)
You may need more control over command line arguments passed from the operating
system shell. For example, you might have a command inside your cmd2
program which itself accepts arguments, and maybe even option strings. Say you
wanted to run the speak
command from the operating system shell, but have
it say it in pig latin:
$ python example/example.py speak -p hello there
python example.py speak -p hello there
usage: speak [-h] [-p] [-s] [-r REPEAT] words [words ...]
speak: error: the following arguments are required: words
*** Unknown syntax: -p
*** Unknown syntax: hello
*** Unknown syntax: there
(Cmd)
Uh-oh, that’s not what we wanted. cmd2
treated -p
, hello
, and
there
as commands, which don’t exist in that program, thus the syntax
errors.
There is an easy way around this, which is demonstrated in
examples/cmd_as_argument.py
. By setting allow_cli_args=False
you can so
your own argument parsing of the command line:
$ python examples/cmd_as_argument.py speak -p hello there
ellohay heretay
Check the source code of this example, especially the main()
function, to
see the technique.