== DoCommands
== Sweet shortcuts for your shell

About
=====

Shell aliases are a very common and easy way to make big shell commands shorter.
However, shell aliases are rather primitive, so you'll soon need to write shell
functions or shell scripts for your specific needs.

_DoCommands_ idea is to provide you with a simple way to write *powerful,
flexible aliases_. For instance, let's say you want to list every file in the
current directory whose name contains 'test'.

>   ls *test*

It's not possible to do an alias that would be like 'ls *$0*', but with
_DoCommands_, you can simply do:

>   like: ls *${0}*

and then:

>   $ do like test
>   do: ls *test*
>   test-main.sh     test-component.sh

Installing
==========

You just need Python 2.4+. Copy the 'Distribution/docommand.py' somewhere in
your path.

>   cp Distribution/docommand.py /usr/local/bin/do

Writing commands
================

_DoCommands_ reads its _command catalog_ from the '~/.docommands' file. The
syntax for this file is very easy:

>     # COMMENT
>     COMMAND : EXPRESSION

where 'COMMAND' is the name of the command (as the 'like' command we just
defined), where 'EXPPRESSION' is a string containing _argument substitution
expressions_.

Argument substitution expressions are like this:

>     ${0}                             (first argument)
>     ${0=.}                           (first argument, or . by default)
>     ${0:pwd}                         (first argument, or the result of '`pwd`)

So here's an example of '~/.docommands' configuration file:

>   edco    : $EDITOR ${0=~/.docommands}
>   like    : ls -l *${0}*
>   findr   : find ${1=.} -name "*${0}*"
>   grep    : grep '${0}' ${1=*}
>   grepr   : grep -r "${0}" ${1=.}
>   list    : ls -l *${0=""}* :

Running commands
================

Once installed, _DoCommands_ will provide a 'do' commmand to your shell
environment. You can simply type 'do' to have a list of available commands:

>   $ do
>   edco   $EDITOR ${0=~/.docommands}
>   like   ls -l *${0}*
>   findr    find ${1=.} -name "*${0}*"
>   grep   grep '${0}' ${1=*}
>   grepr    grep -r "${0}" ${1=.}
>   list   ls -l *${0=""}* :

then simply type 'do' followed by the name of the command you want to execute
and the arguments:

>   $ do findr test
>   do:find . -name "*test*"
>   ./Testing/Sources/testing.css
>   ./Testing/Sources/testing.js

The first line of the output will be the do command you just executed.

Tips and Tricks
===============

- You can get a lot of cool one-liners at Command Line Fu
  (<http://www.commandlinefu.com>).

- To have command completion with TCSH, simply do
  >   set DOCOMMANDS=`cat ~/.docommands | cut -d':' -f1 | egrep '^[^ #].*$' | xargs echo`
  >   set DOCOMPLETE="p/1/(${DOCOMMANDS})/"
  >   complete do "${DOCOMPLETE}"

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