Invalid Command name when command starts with same character as a shortcut.

I don’t know if quit already exists in the library, but I have a command do_quit that just exits out of the command line. And then I use shortcuts to shortcut q -> quit and exit -> quit.

However, doing this results in this error:

ValueError: Invalid command name 'quit': cannot start with a shortcut: @@, ?, !, @, q

[kmvanbrunt]

@xNinjaKittyx There is a distinction between shortcuts and aliases that makes shortcuts very convenient. A shortcut does not require a space between it and its arguments. So the following command lines are valid:

• !ls
• ?macro

The parser checks if a command line begins with a shortcut, and if so, splits them as follows:

• ! ls
• ? macro

Because of this, there is no way to run your quit command directly.

Since quit begins with the shortcut q,the parser splits it this way: q uit At that point, the parser resolves q into quit which results in a final command line of

quit uit

In your case, the behavior was being masked because your quit function probably just ignores the argument uit being passed to it.

If your application had another command that started with q but wasn’t related to quit, you would have seen the issue faster. I added the error message to 0.9.16 to prevent this exact problem.

If you still want to type q and run quit, then you want an alias. For your shortcuts, you will run two commands. alias create q quit alias create exit quit

You can create these at startup in a few ways:

1. Have a startup script that runs your alias creation commands
2. Run self.runcmds_plus_hooks() with these commands in a list.

You will see the output of the alias creation when the application starts.

Alias ‘q’ created Alias ‘exit’ created

If you don’t want to see that output, then redirect the commands to /dev/null or your operating system’s equivalent. You can also pass add_to_history=False to self.runcmds_plus_hooks() if you don’t want the alias creation commands to be stored in history.

By the way. cmd2 already has a do_quit() method. If ours already does what you need, then you can remove yours.

[xNinjaKittyx]

Cool, I like that one. Thanks everyone.