command_help VS murex

I use a lot of CLI tools, but haven't written many for myself. Mostly, aliases/functions and some scripts in Bash/Python.

Extract details for command options from man/help: https://github.com/learnbyexample/command_help/blob/master/c...

cut-like syntax for field manipulations with regexp, negative indexing, etc: https://github.com/learnbyexample/regexp-cut/blob/main/rcut

simple calculator using python syntax: https://learnbyexample.github.io/practice_python_projects/ca...

I wrote a Linux CLI tool [0] that parses the man/help pages to extract option details. Works most of the time for me, but there are plenty of corner cases that don't work.

[0] https://github.com/learnbyexample/command_help

https://github.com/learnbyexample/command_help to extract help text from builtin commands and man pages, ex:

https://github.com/learnbyexample/command_help is big enough to warrant a repo, examples, limitations, etc. I had a list of todo items to improve the script, but after years of usage, I'm fine with the limitations since I rarely encounter them. This helps me to extract documentation of particular options, here's an example:

I wrote one a few years back (https://github.com/learnbyexample/command_help). It has a few corner case issues, but works most of the time for me and supports multiple options to be retrieved.

I particularly wanted to lookup documentation for command options from my terminal (instead of the website), so wrote a script for it: https://github.com/learnbyexample/command_help ... Have a long pending todo list, but despite the issues, the tool is good enough for my needs.

When I start a project, I usually try to write the programs incrementally. Say I need to iterate over files from a directory. I will make sure that portion is working (usually with print() statements), then add another feature — say file reading and test that and so on. This reduces the burden of testing a large program at once at the end. And depending upon the nature of the program, I'll add a few sanity tests at the end. For example, for my command_help project, I copy pasted a few test runs of the program with different options and arguments into a separate file and wrote a program to perform these tests programmatically whenever the source code is modified.

This is how murex works too https://github.com/lmorg/murex/blob/master/config/defaults/p...

I agree. I’ve written about this before but this is what murex (1) does. It reimplements some of coreutils where there are benefits in doing so (eg sed, grep etc -like parsing of lists that are in formats other than flat lines of text. Such as JSON arrays)

Mutex does this by having these utilities named slightly different to their POSIX counterparts. So you can use all of the existing CLI tools completely but additionally have a bunch of new stuff too.

Far too many alt shells these days try to replace coreutils and that just creates friction in my opinion.

1. https://murex.rocks

This is exactly what Murex shell does. It has lots of builtin tools for querying structured data (of varying formats) but also supports POSIX pipes for using existing tools like `jq` et al seamlessly too.

https://murex.rocks

Stable is a problem because a lot of these shells don’t offer any guarantees for breaking changes.

My own shell, https://github.com/lmorg/murex is committed to backwards compatibility but even here, there are occasional changes made that might break backwards compatibility. Though I do push back on such changes as much as possible, to the extent that most of my scripts from 5 years ago still run unmodified.

This is similar to how my shell works. It still just passes bytes around but additionally passes information about how those bytes could be interpreted. A schema if you will. So it works as cleanly with POSIX / GNU / et al tools as it does with fancy JSON, YAML, CSV and other document formats.

It basically sits somewhere between Powershell and Bash: typed pipelines like Powershell but without sacrificing familiarity with all the CLI commands you already use day in and day out.

https://github.com/lmorg/murex

As an aside, I’m about to drop a massive update in the next few days that will make the shell even more intuitive to use.