Frequently Asked Questions

What is a cli?
How do I add a command-line flag?
How do I access the value of a command-line argument?
How do I incorporate bash3boilerplate into my own project?
What is a magic variable?
How do I incorporate bash3boilerplate into my own project?
How can I contribute to this project?

What is a cli?

A 'cli' is a command-line interface.

How do I incorporate bash3boilerplate into my own project?

You can incorporate bash3boilerplate into your project one of three ways:

Copy the desired portions of main.sh into your own script.
Copy main.sh into the same directory as your script and then edit and embed it into your script using bash's dot (".") include feature, e.g. #!/usr/bin/env bash . main.sh
Source main.sh in your script or at the command line source main.sh
... (add additional use cases here and descriptions of how to use other files in bash3boilerplate)

How do I add a command-line flag?

Copy the line the main.sh read block that most resembles the desired behavior and paste the line into the same block.
Edit the single-character (e.g., -d) and, if present, the multi-character (e.g., --debug) versions of the flag in the copied line.
Omit the "[arg]" text in the copied line if the desired flag takes no arguments.
Omit or edit the text after "Default:" to set or not set default values, respectively.
Omit the "Required." text if the flag is optional.

How do I access the value of a command-line argument?

To evaluate the value of an argument, append the corresponding single-character flag to the text "$arg_". For example, if the [read block] contains the line

   -t --temp  [arg] Location of tempfile. Default="/tmp/bar"

then you can evalute the correspondign argument and assign it to a variable as follows:

   temp_file_name=$arg_t

What is a magic variable?

The magic variables in main.sh are special in that they have a different value, depending on your environment. You can use ${__file} to get a reference to your current script, ${__dir} to get a reference to the directory it lives in. This is not to be confused with the location of the calling script that might be sourcing the ${__file}, which is accessible via ${0}, and the current directory of the administrator running the script, accessible via $(pwd). Other magic variables are for instance ${__os} which currently is limited to telling you wether you are on OSX and otherwise defaults to Linux.

How do I submit an issue report?

Please visit our Issues page.

How can I contribute to this project?

Please fork this repository. Then create a branch containing your suggested changes and submit a pull request based on the master branch of https://github.com/kvz/bash3boilerplate/.

3.5 KiB Raw Blame History