this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2024
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
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Coming back to this with thoughts. What you're describing sounds a lot like a menu tree.
"Press 1 to do this, 2 to do that, 3 to go to submenu A, 4 for B," etc.
1"You have pressed 1. Do you want to turn on option ABC? [Y / n]"
Y"Do you want option QWERTY47? [Y/n]"
N"Are you sure you want to run
notthebees --abc --no-qwerty47? [Y/n]"N"Aborted."
It sounds like a standards problem waiting to happen because no two menus will be alike, but hey, things like this can and do exist, and setting one up isn't that hard, only time consuming.
This was my thought exactly. And I also had the same assessment that having various arguments be context aware would be challenging, since some have sub-arguments of their own (with further sub-arguments of their own, etc.) but can sometimes be strung together all on the same line. How do you determine if someone wants an ascendant argument or a descendant argument when you're three layers deep into the tree?
You would have to make opinionated decisions, which was the whole reason to avoid scripts in the first place. Seems like it would be better to just make executable scripts (which is what Fedora Atomics basically do with the
justcommand) or gamify learning how to work in the terminal.Something like this can kind of be achieved programmatically by unraveling bash completion arguments and loosely parsing terminal help strings.
They aren't all formatted uniformly though, so you'll need to come up with a filtering mechanism to prevent returning garbage. You'll also always be a little out of date...