Ookii.CommandLine provides the ability to create an application that has more than one function by using shell commands.
Shell commands can be used to create shell utilities that perform more than one operation, where each operation has its own set of command line arguments. For example, a utility might be used to modify or query different configuration parameters of a system. Depending on whether it's a query or a modification, and which configuration parameter is used, the arguments to such a utility might differ. Rather than provide different executables for each operation, it is often more convenient to combine related operations in a single utility.
Think for example of the Windows net command, which provides many different operations through the same command. Shell commands allow you to easily create such an application.
For a program using shell commands, typically the first command line argument will be the name of the operation and identifies which shell command to use, while the remaining arguments are arguments to the command. The ShellCommand class aids you in creating utilities that follow this pattern.
A shell command is created by deriving a type from the ShellCommand class, specifying the ShellCommandAttribute on that type to specify the name of the command, and implementing the ShellCommand.Run method for that type.
The class inheriting the ShellCommand class defines the arguments for the command. This class will be used with the CommandLineParser class to parse the arguments for the command.
To use a shell command, you must first determine the shell command the user wishes to invoke, typically by inspecting the first element of the array of arguments passed to the Main method of your application.
You can then get the Type instance of the shell command’s class by calling the ShellCommand.GetShellCommand method. This method searches the specified assembly for a type that inherits from the ShellCommand class, and has the ShellCommandAttribute attribute applied with the ShellCommandAttribute.Name property set to the specified name. You can also get a list of all shell commands in an assembly by using the ShellCommand.GetShellCommands method.
This Type instance can be passed to the constructor of the CommandLineParser class, after which you can parse arguments for the command as usual (make sure to pass an index so that the command name is not treated as an argument), and finally invoke its ShellCommand.Run method.
The ShellCommand class provides static utility methods that perform these tasks for you. The ShellCommand.CreateShellCommand method finds and creates a shell command, and writes error and usage information to the output if it failed. If no command name was specified, or the specified command name could not be found, it writes a list of all shell commands in the assembly and their descriptions to the output. If the command was found but parsing its arguments failed, it writes usage information for that command to the output.
The ShellCommand.RunShellCommand method works the same as the ShellCommand.CreateShellCommand method, but also invokes the ShellCommand.Run method if the command was successfully created.
It is recommended to return the value of the ShellCommand.ExitCode property to the operating system (by returning it from the Main method or by using the Environment.``ExitCode property) after running the shell command.
The source code of a full sample application that defines two commands is included with the Ookii.CommandLine library.