half-baked support for adding --xml support to POSIX commands
Project description
xmlcmd is a proof of concept experiment in augmenting standard POSIX commands with superpowers, such as outputting xml.
Sadly it is more sleight of hand than any real magic.
To begin with, a directory which is first on the PATH must be created (e.g. ~/bin). This should not be on the path which whereis uses, so if things go wrong you can always do $(whereis cmd) to execute affected commands.
The idea is to put symlinks to xmlcmd (which is created in the normal python setup.py install installation) into this directory for a number of commands. When these commands are run with an –xml option, the _{cmd} module will be imported from the xmlcmd package and the main() function run with two arguments: the original list of command line arguments (typically corresponding to sys.argv) minus the --xml, and the full path to the ‘original’ file which would have been run if the --xml option had not been specified.
This is similar to the way busybox works to implement a whole range of UNIX commands from a single binary, by using argv[0] to determine the required action. This allows the relevant logic to be factored out into a single place.
ben$ sudo pip install xmlcmd ... ben$ ln -s $(which xmlcmd) ~/bin/ls ben$ ls --xml <an XMLish representation of a file listing...>
Plans:
Add a few more commands (currently only supports ls and ps)
Put a bunch of actually helpful XML output things into the xmlcmd package to simplify creation of additional command helpers
A more useful xpath command than the perl program of that name on my OS X and Ubuntu installs
Ben Bass 2011
