Larcanum.ShellToolkit 1.0.0

Overview

The goal of this library is to provide a set of tools to start and interact with processes on the host system in a way that is similarly easy to use as Bash or oder shells. First and foremost this means providing a convenient API on top of the rather crusty and awkward System.Diagnostics.Process and System.Diagnostics.ProcessStartInfo. On top of that, the library provides methods for building pipelines of commands similar to how pipes work in Bash.

One common use case and the reason for creating this library is the creation of custom .NET command line tools that rely on other programs like git, 7z, dotnet, jq, sed, awk, etc. to avoid reinventing the wheel.

Examples

The examples here are assuming that the following command line tools are available in your system PATH

• dotnet CLI
• jq

Capturing and Processing simple Command Output

var runner = CommandRunner.Create();

var version = Version.Parse((await runner.CaptureAsync(Command.Create("dotnet", ["--version"]))).Output!);
// version.Major = 8
// version.Minor = 0
// version.Build = 200

Running Command Output through Filters and into a File

var runner = CommandRunner.Create();
var tempFile = new FileInfo(Path.GetTempFileName());

var pipeline = Command.Create("dotnet", ["list", @"C:\path\to\ShellToolkit.csproj", "package", "--format", "json"])
    .Pipe(Command.Create("jq", [".projects.[].frameworks.[].topLevelPackages.[].id"]))
    .Pipe(tempFile);

if (await runner.ExecAsync(pipeline) != 0)
{
    throw new Exception("Pipeline failed");
}

var result = await File.ReadAllTextAsync(tempFile.FullName);
// result = "Microsoft.Extensions.Logging.Abstractions"