commandline - set or get the current command line buffer

Synopsis

commandline [OPTIONS] [CMD]

Description

commandline can be used to set or get the current contents of the command line buffer.

With no parameters, commandline returns the current value of the command line.

With CMD specified, the command line buffer is erased and replaced with the contents of CMD.

The following options are available:

  • -C or --cursor set or get the current cursor position, not the contents of the buffer. If no argument is given, the current cursor position is printed, otherwise the argument is interpreted as the new cursor position. If one of the options -j, -p or -t is given, the position is relative to the respective substring instead of the entire command line buffer.

  • -f or --function causes any additional arguments to be interpreted as input functions, and puts them into the queue, so that they will be read before any additional actual key presses are. This option cannot be combined with any other option. See bind for a list of input functions.

The following options change the way commandline updates the command line buffer:

  • -a or --append do not remove the current commandline, append the specified string at the end of it

  • -i or --insert do not remove the current commandline, insert the specified string at the current cursor position

  • -r or --replace remove the current commandline and replace it with the specified string (default)

The following options change what part of the commandline is printed or updated:

  • -b or --current-buffer select the entire commandline, not including any displayed autosuggestion (default)

  • -j or --current-job select the current job - a job here is one pipeline. It stops at logical operators or terminators (;, & or newlines).

  • -p or --current-process select the current process - a process here is one simple command. It stops at logical operators, terminators or pipes.

  • -s or --current-selection selects the current selection

  • -t or --current-token select the current token

The following options change the way commandline prints the current commandline buffer:

  • -c or --cut-at-cursor only print selection up until the current cursor position

  • -o or --tokenize tokenize the selection and print one string-type token per line

If commandline is called during a call to complete a given string using complete -C STRING, commandline will consider the specified string to be the current contents of the command line.

The following options output metadata about the commandline state:

  • -L or --line print the line that the cursor is on, with the topmost line starting at 1

  • -S or --search-mode evaluates to true if the commandline is performing a history search

  • -P or --paging-mode evaluates to true if the commandline is showing pager contents, such as tab completions

Example

commandline -j $history[3] replaces the job under the cursor with the third item from the command line history.

If the commandline contains

>_ echo $flounder >&2 | less; and echo $catfish

(with the cursor on the "o" of "flounder")

The echo $flounder >& is the first process, less the second and and echo $catfish the third.

echo $flounder >&2 | less is the first job, and echo $catfish the second.

$flounder is the current token.

More examples:

>_ commandline -t
$flounder
>_ commandline -ct
$fl
>_ commandline -b # or just commandline
echo $flounder >&2 | less; and echo $catfish
>_ commandline -p
echo $flounder >&2
>_ commandline -j
echo $flounder >&2 | less