contextcommands

This tool allows for running context-sensitive commands that will look at the previous command you ran to determine how it should act. It was inspired by Google Now's context-sensitive capabilities.

Installation

This tool requires the importlib module which is included in Python 3.x, but needs to be installed in 2.x.

Clone this repo to your local system, then run the install.sh script. It will copy the files into ~/.local/bin/contextcommands and give you a line to put in your ~/.bashrc file to add the 'c' function to your environment.

Example usage:

sudo systemctl restart apache2
c status

In this example, the 'c' command is a bash function in context.bash that takes the argument of 'status' in this case, grabs the previous command from history, then feeds both to the context.py Python script to determine what kind of action to take.

The systemctl command is detected because of the systemctl.py module under modules/ and that module checks to see if the argument ('status') is one of several defined actions for the systemctl command. Since 'status' is in the defined list of actions, it takes the previous command, replaces 'restart' with 'status', and sends the command text back to the 'c' function for display, adding to the bash history, and finally running the command. The 'systemctl' module also allows for changing the service name in the previous command as well. Any context command that doesn't match a defined systemctl action will be assumed to be a service name.

The other initial modules that I've added are for the 'less', 'cat', and 'docker' commands. The 'less' and 'cat' modules are basically the same. After running either of those, a context command like c nano or c vim will replace less or cat with the command after the 'c'. This is for the common use case of needing to edit a file after viewing it with less or cat. The 'docker' module is similar to the 'systemctl' module and can change the action in commands like docker start container1.

Creating Modules

I'll be adding more modules and refining/extending the ones that I have as I find more use cases for this. If you want to make your own modules, take a look at the less.py and systemctl.py files in the modules folder as examples. Both are commented.

Modules will be auto-detected when the 'c' command is invoked.

The 3 requirements for a module are:

1. It must have a context() function like the examples that takes in the list item containing the previous command, and the context command word.
2. The context() function must return either a command string or None.
3. It should not be possible for the returned command string to contain an unintentionally destructive action. For example, if you make a module for rm (which I probably won't do), make sure that it won't replace the file name with something like '*'.

Contributing

I welcome useful module additions and enhancements. Please make sure to test your code and add comments where appropriate.