A program to help manage scripts/alias with a flexible subcommand like structure.

The primary motivation for this is to better manage my growing alias file where I have multiple relates aliases with the same prefix (which is better grouped under a subcommand) and a more convenient place to store cool one liners.

This program is in development and many features/changes may be made over time.

See my dotfiles for a real-world example of its usage.

The program reads from $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/xrun/command.toml for commands. This is usually ~/.config/xrun/command.toml.

Each command can have the following keys

• command: (optional for subcommands) A string of the command to execute.
• desc: (optional) description of the command/subcommand.

Any other key is treated as the name of the command. Commands can be nested to create a subcommand in command tree structure.

For example

[msg]
bid-farewell = { command = "echo bye", desc = "says bye" }

[msg.greet]
desc = "greets the user"
command = "xrun msg greet kind"
casual = { command = "echo sup", desc = "says sup" }
kind = { command = "echo hi", desc = "says hi" }

You can then use the program as follows

> xrun msg greet
hi
> xrun msg greet kind
hi
> xrun msg greet casual
sup
> xrun msg bid-farewell
bye
> xrun msg --help
usage: xrun msg [command]
commands:
    bid-farewell: says bye
    greet: greets the user
> xrun msg greet --help
usage: xrun msg greet [command]
greets the user

commands:
    casual: says sup
    kind: says hi

Using the --passthrough flag prints the shell commands to stdout. This can be used to run the command directly in the current shell and avoid any weirdness/performance hits of spawning a new shell as a child of xrun.

An exit code of 125 is returned if a shell command was returned. This can be used in bash like shells (or whatever equivalent for your shell) as follows:

function xrun() {
  output=$("$@" 2>&1)
  if [ $? -eq 125 ]; then
    eval "$output"
  else
    echo "$output"
  fi
}