allow Vorpal to run arbitrary bash commands and pipe back to shell

My Vorpal options are like so:

  Commands:

    help [command...]  Provides help for a given command.
    exit               Exits application.
    pwd                echo present working directory
    run [file]         run a single test script
    find [options]     find test files to run

I’d like to be able to type a command - if it’s not a recognized option - to send it to bash and have bash interpret it.

One thing I could do is create a new option

bash [command...]

and then I could send all the arguments to bash that way…

however that requires users to type in something like:

> bash "ls -a"

or

> bash "ps aux | grep node"

like I said, it would be cool to be able to give Vorpal the option of sending unrecognized commands to bash and then piping the results back to vorpal terminal.

[uri-chandler]

@ORESoftware Hmm… maybe I’m missing something - but I think exec is the one to use if we don’t want to parse the string, since the signature for spawn requires the first param to be the command-to-run, and then an array of arguments to pass into that command.

For example: Command: ls -a "dog bear cat" | grep "sally road"

Using spawn: spawn(ls, ['-a', '"dog bear cat"', '|', 'grep', '"sally road"'])

Using exec: exec('ls -a "dog bear cat" | grep "sally road"')

Plus, spawn requires us to read from stdout and\or stderr to get the result, where as exec will provide the results to the callback - so maybe it’s a better fit in this specific use case?

Back to the raw-string issue Yes, a full solution will need to keep track of control-characters - such as line-feed, carriage-return, backspace, cursor-moves etc… - BUT - it’s not that hard to implement - definitely doable (perhaps I’ll have time for that next weekend).

Also, we could publish it as a vorpal extension \ plugin - something like vorpal-shell-fallback. This will be a cleaner way to use, and will allow anyone to add it just by doing vorpal.use('vorpal-shell-fallback')

[jeremygiberson-at-privoro]

Here is an updated version that works well. It gets the raw input from the user and passes it to the shell.

const {spawn} = require('child_process');

const passthru = function(args, done){
  let vorpal = this;
  // get the unparsed raw value typed in to the prompt
  let raw = vorpal.commandWrapper.command; // not an official API method but works until a significant change to the lib

  // shell:true option https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23487363/how-can-i-parse-a-string-into-appropriate-arguments-for-child-process-spawn
  let passthru_process = spawn(raw, [], {shell:true});
  // using vorpal.log instead of process.stdout because I want to be able to pipe output to other vorpal commands
  passthru_process.stdout.on('data', buffer => {
    vorpal.log(buffer.toString('utf8'))
  })
  // perhaps this could go to vorpal.log as well, your use may vary
  passthru_process.stderr.pipe(process.stderr);

  passthru_process.on('close', done)
}



  vorpal
    .catch('[cmd...]')
    .action(passthru)
    .allowUnknownOptions(true)

Seems to handle opts and args gracefully:

tool$ ls -laR ./logs
total 16
drwxr-xr-x   4 me  staff   128 Feb 13 14:35 .
drwxr-xr-x@ 40 me  staff  1280 Feb 12 13:30 ..
-rw-r--r--   1 me  staff  2027 Feb 13 14:35 AppRegistration.mocha.log
-rw-r--r--   1 me  staff  2145 Feb 13 14:35 AppRegistration.mocha.server.log