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Good idea. I wonder if anyone has done this for general unix command-line apps by parsing out the man pages on the fly. It probably wouldn't work for all progra

Good idea. I wonder if anyone has done this for general unix command-line apps by parsing out the man pages on the fly. It probably wouldn't work for all programs but may be gnu style ones would be consistent enough.

eldelshell 12y ago
I too was expecting something like what you describe but by parsing -h --help output.
- gioele 12y ago
  The bash-completion script can deduce which options are supported by an application by parsing the output of --help and of usage lines. In Bash. http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/bash-completion/bash-completion.git/tree/bash_completion#n771 http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/bash-completion/bash-completi...
- DennisP 12y ago
  Either way, it might be neat to do it dynamically, so command-line programs could be turned into guis live by typing "guify xyz". The gui could have labels with the command options, and upon hitting enter they could close and send the command back to the command line, so you're learning the commands as you go.
naranja 12y ago
The fish shell does this with an explicit command (fish_update_completions) and offers an awesome Tab completion in the current Github version
jlarocco 12y ago
I've done something similar to this a few times, both in Python. Once to create a TkInter GUI for an internal command line app, and once to wrap sg3_utils for use in Python scripts. In general, I think it could "mostly work" a good portion of the time, but it'd be pretty difficult to get working 100% of the time without a lot of tweaking to the parser.
agumonkey 12y ago
Not far from that there's docopt who parses POSIX compliant arguments descriptions.
- michaelmior 12y ago
  Is there such a thing as POSIX-compliant argument descriptions? I know POSIX specifies some things about the format of options, but I didn't realize there was a formalized option description language.
  - euid 12y ago
    Yes. IEEE Std. 1003.1 Utility Conventions http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_chap12.html http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_... This is actually how Docopt happened (Vladimir Keleshev mentioned it in the PyCon UK 2012 talk).
    - michaelmior 12y ago
      Cool! Thanks for the reference :)
  - agumonkey 12y ago
    Me neither, I thought docopt was a hardcoded fragile thing, until the author explains everything is almost perfectly defined.
davvid 12y ago
The Python "argcomplete" module[1] generates shell completions for any program that uses argparse, so it's certainly doable. [1] https://github.com/kislyuk/argcomplete https://github.com/kislyuk/argcomplete
vdm 12y ago
> parsing out the man pages https://github.com/idank/explainshell https://github.com/idank/explainshell

eldelshell 12y ago

I too was expecting something like what you describe but by parsing -h --help output.

gioele 12y ago
The bash-completion script can deduce which options are supported by an application by parsing the output of --help and of usage lines. In Bash. http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/bash-completion/bash-completion.git/tree/bash_completion#n771 http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/bash-completion/bash-completi...
DennisP 12y ago
Either way, it might be neat to do it dynamically, so command-line programs could be turned into guis live by typing "guify xyz". The gui could have labels with the command options, and upon hitting enter they could close and send the command back to the command line, so you're learning the commands as you go.

naranja 12y ago

The fish shell does this with an explicit command (fish_update_completions) and offers an awesome Tab completion in the current Github version

jlarocco 12y ago

I've done something similar to this a few times, both in Python. Once to create a TkInter GUI for an internal command line app, and once to wrap sg3_utils for use in Python scripts. In general, I think it could "mostly work" a good portion of the time, but it'd be pretty difficult to get working 100% of the time without a lot of tweaking to the parser.

agumonkey 12y ago

Not far from that there's docopt who parses POSIX compliant arguments descriptions.

michaelmior 12y ago
Is there such a thing as POSIX-compliant argument descriptions? I know POSIX specifies some things about the format of options, but I didn't realize there was a formalized option description language.
- euid 12y ago
  Yes. IEEE Std. 1003.1 Utility Conventions http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_chap12.html http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_... This is actually how Docopt happened (Vladimir Keleshev mentioned it in the PyCon UK 2012 talk).
  - michaelmior 12y ago
    Cool! Thanks for the reference :)
- agumonkey 12y ago
  Me neither, I thought docopt was a hardcoded fragile thing, until the author explains everything is almost perfectly defined.

davvid 12y ago

The Python "argcomplete" module[1] generates shell completions for any program that uses argparse, so it's certainly doable. [1] https://github.com/kislyuk/argcomplete https://github.com/kislyuk/argcomplete

vdm 12y ago

> parsing out the man pages https://github.com/idank/explainshell https://github.com/idank/explainshell