Show HN: Crsh – A JavaScript based command line shell
crwi.ukHey I like it! But is it deno-only or also working on Node.js? The latter would be much much more useful for me.
Thanks! It's Deno only I'm afraid. I'm interested in what would make it more useful for you as a Node project (so that I can gather info on the sorts of use cases that would be good).
Hi thanks for the response. My use case would be to execute relatively small snippets of shell code/one-liners as part of an asset management pipeline without having to "shell-out" and invoke an external process, mostly at deploy-time, in a portable fashion, such as rendering a static HTML file upon change of dependent data, or rendering an image/icon from a vector format representation, and similar tasks. Requirements for shell control constructs are modest, but piping and redirection should work, as well as limited shell var/macros expansion, and maybe if/then. In Node.js-land, there's the shelljs package which is both an API for (synchronous-only AFAICS) shell-like ops (as in "shelljs.ls('file.???')" and a (very limited) shell syntax parser that could call those funcs from a string ("ls file.???") like yours as far as I can understand, but I guess yours is already more capable then the one shelljs uses. Still, shelljs is used as a dependency by quite a number of high-profile packages.
Node.js is much more useful simply because everything in js-land (asset management tools, web server backends) runs on Node.js rather than deno :)
Sorry for the late response.
> execute relatively small snippets of shell code/one-liners as part of an asset management pipeline without having to "shell-out" and invoke an external process
This is indeed a small part of the value of my shell, though I wouldn't view it as the primary reason. I'm trying to make a nice experience for an interactive command line shell first, then will think about scripting use cases.
Blurring that line between shell + scripting is my intention, so it would be good to capture your case here at some point.
> Requirements for shell control constructs are modest, but piping and redirection should work, as well as limited shell var/macros expansion, and maybe if/then.
I'm struggling to understand one detail of your use case here. Is this a script (stored as some e.g. .js file), or something you'd be executing interactively? If the former, my shell does have as part of its library a suite of tools for executing shell commands (including piping + redirect) from within the Deno runtime. That would make something like the following possible:
const jsFilesInDirectory = await exec('ls | grep .js');
if (jsFilesInDirectory.includes('index.js') {
}// some logicThe above is also strikingly similar to shelljs, but my solution differs in a key way: where shelljs is re-implementing many commands, I've developed logic for parsing and evaluating any shell-like "pipe-separated" commands.
In any case, the primary intention of my project is to create an interactive shell, not a scripting language. That said, it would be possible to tease out and reproduce my logic to parse and execute piped commands in Node.js, to allow for a slightly more capable "shelljs" clone.
Hope that helps.
Yes, as I looked into your code, I was even tempted (in thought only, eg subconsciously feasability-checking) to fork/rip your shell syntax parser and plug it into shelljs to replace theirs ;)
To clarify, in my use case, the native asset meta-format for declaring assets and their relationships has a "field" where you can put in an external command to prepare the asset (such as minifying, sass compilation). Like in a Makefile.