https://gist.github.com/4139094

Commands and features:

• cd - change directory
• pwd - print current working directory
• ls - list directory contents (and file sizes)
• cat - print the contents of a file
• q/quit/exit/logoff/logout - exit the shell
• mkdir - make a directory
• mv - move or rename files / directories
• cp - copy files / directories (recursively)
• rm - delete files / directories (recursively)
• unzip - unzip zip archives
• untar - untar tar archives
• ungzip / gunzip - ungzip gzipped files
• Supports wildcard matches (matching any number of characters)
• Supports ? / question mark matches (matching exactly one of any character)
• Supports [ranges] (like [a-z], [0-9], [a-f0-9], etc.)
• Supports ~ / tilde replacement (defaults to Documents folder)
• Supports environment variables ($HOME, but you can expand it)
• Supports single quote escaping (special characters are disabled)
• Supports backslash escaping (for individual special characters)
• Supports double quotes (for preserving spaces, but allowing special sequences)

Examples of advanced usage:
ls *.py */*.py (lists all .py files in current directory and at the top level of any folders in current directory)
cp ~/*.py backup (copies all python scripts in the root scripts directory to a folder named 'backup')
rm test[1-3]?.txt (removes files test1a.txt, test2a.txt, test2b.txt, test2c.txt, test3-.txt, etc.)

This is an intial (rough) port of a script I put together for another python interpreter on the app store. I'll be porting the rest of the commands soon: unzip, ungzip, untar, wget/curl (basic download functionality)


Enjoy :)



For the interested programmer:

This script uses a pure python re-implementation of some of the more basic globbing of "bash" which I wrote up myself. It's a little different than shlex, glob, or shlex+glob in that matching happens in a single parsing run through. It depends on glob for wildcard handling, but only after my code has already handled all character escapes and word parsing.

An example where shlex/glob fails:

In the current working directory are three files: 'test apple', 'peach', 'test a*' (with an asterisk as part of the name)

The command to parse is the string: rm 'test a*' peach

shlex interprets it as ['rm', 'test a*', 'peach'], which glob then interprets the file portion as a match of three files: ['test apple', 'test a*', 'peach']. shlex unfortunately clobbers quotes that in a bash environment specify that the special character should be treated as a literal. This would result in deletion of all 3 files.

With my parser, the single quotes around 'test a*' are interpreted bash-style to mean escaping of the special character '*' - disabling it as a wildcard match and turning it into a literal match, resulting in the deletion of only two files: 'test a*' and 'peach'.