A utility for running external programs, built on UIOP.
Cmd is designed to:
- Be natural to use.
- Protect against shell interpolation.
- Be usable from multi-threaded programs.
- Support Windows.
Arguments to cmd are never passed to a shell for interpretation.
Arguments are handled as follows:
-
A string is tokenized (using cl-shlex) and added to the list of arguments.
(cmd "ls -al") ≡ (uiop:run-program '("ls" "-al")) (cmd "echo 'hello world'") ≡ (uiop:run-program '("echo" "hello world"))
-
A list of strings is added directly to the list of arguments (not tokenized). (Putting a string in a list is “escaping” it.)
(cmd "bash -c 'exit 1'") ≡ (cmd "bash -c" '("exit 1"))
-
A literal keyword, along with the next value, is passed through as a keyword argument to UIOP.
(cmd "bash -c 'exit 1'" :ignore-error-status t) ≡ (cmd :ignore-error-status t "bash -c 'exit 1'") ≡ (cmd "bash -c" :ignore-error-status t '("exit 1")) ≡ (uiop:run-program '("bash" "-c" "exit 1") :ignore-error-status t)
Note that unlike normal Lisp functions, keyword arguments can appear anywhere, not just at the end.
-
Any other string, integer, or pathname is directly added to the list of arguments. (It is an error if a pathname begins with
-.)
Cmd is designed with multi-threaded programs in mind. It always runs
programs with their working directory relative to
*default-pathname-defaults*. This is because the OS-level
working directory a program, on both Windows and Unix, is the working
directory of the entire process, not the individual thread, and
changing it changes it for all threads.
You can also specify the directory for a particular command with the
keyword argument :in:
(cmd "ls" :in #p"/")
(cmd :in #p"/" "ls")
=> /bin /home /tmp /usr ...The cmd package offers several entry points:
-
cmdruns an external program synchronously, returning the exit code. By default, on a non-zero exit it signals an error.(cmd "cat /etc/os-release") NAME="Ubuntu" [...] => 0
-
$cmdreturns the output of the external program as a string, stripping any trailing newline. (Much like$(cmd)in a shell.)($cmd "date") => "Sun Sep 27 15:43:01 CDT 2020"
-
cmd?returnstif the external program returned0, andnilotherwise, with the exit code as a second value. As other variants by default signal an error if the process exists non-zero,cmd?is useful for programs that are expected to fail.(cmd? "kill -0" pid) => T # PID is a live process => NIL # PID is not a live process
-
cmd&runs an external program asynchronously (withuiop:launch-program) and returns a UIOPprocess-infoobject.(cmd& "cp -a" src dest) => #<PROCESS-INFO ...>
Redirection is accomplished via keyword arguments. These should be self-explanatory to anyone who has used a shell.
(cmd "echo 'hello world'" :> #p"hello.txt")
(cmd "cat" #p"hello.txt")
=> hello world
;; Append
(cmd "echo 'goodbye world'" :>> #p"hello.txt")
(cmd "cat" #p"hello.txt")
=> hello world
goodbye world
(cmd "tar cf -" #p"hello.txt" :> #p"hello.tar")
(cmd "rm" #p"hello.txt")
(cmd "tar xf" #p"hello.tar")
(cmd "cat" #p"hello.txt")
=> hello world
goodbye world
Supported directions are:
:<Redirect stdin.:>,:1>Redirect stdout.:>>,:1>>Append stdout.:2>Redirect stderr.:2>>Append stderr.:&>,:>&Redirect stdout and stderr.:&>>,:>>&Append stdout and stderr.
There are two hooks you can use to control cmd. These are exported from the cmd/hooks package (so you can :use :cmd without having to worry about them.) Both hooks expect a list of functions of one argument.
The hook *message-hook* is called with the external program and its arguments, quoted as a shell command line. This can be useful for logging commands as they are run.
The hook *proc-hook* is called with the process object (as returned by uiop:launch-program). This can be useful if you want to be able to track what is being run in a particular dynamic extent.
On Windows only, the first argument (the program name) has .exe appended to it automatically if it doesn’t already have a file extension.
While cmd does not use a shell to interpret its arguments, it does still have to run a shell (sh on Unix, cmd.exe on Windows) in order to change the working directory of the program.
How inefficient this is depends on what your distribution uses as a shell; it is faster when sh is, say, dash, than when it is bash.
Recent versions of GNU env support a -C switch to do this directly. When that is supported (support is detected dynamically) then env -C is used in place of a shell and overhead is negligible.
Cmd is a spinoff of Overlord, a Common Lisp build system, and was inspired by the cmd function in Shake, a Haskell build system.
I plan to support at least inline redirection (e.g. (cmd "sth file > other-file")) and pipelines.