Parsing args in GLI

Hi, I’m trying to rewrite my option parser app in GLI and I’m not sure how to do it.

What I want for the user to type is:

sysinfo get cpu
sysinfo set hostname

In the generated scaffold code I tried adding the following:

c.desc ‘Get CPU info
c.arg_name ‘cpu’

But I’m not sure how to check whether this argument was passed.

I tried this in the c.action block:

if args == “cpu” puts ‘cpu’
end

But nothing is printed.

It looks like you’re wanting a multi-level command suite. GLI doesn’t support this directly (though it’s planned for GLI 2.0), but you could do it like so:

desc 'get info'
arg_name 'attribute_to_get'
command :get do |c|
  c.action do |global_options,options,args|
    raise "Argument required" if args.empty?
    case args[0]
      when 'cpu' # => whatever
      when 'hostname' # => whatever
    end
  end
end

And similar for <a href="mailto:set”>set@.

Another option would be to make your commands like get_cpu and set_hostname, so you’d do

command :get_cpu do |c|
  c.action do |global,options,args|
    # => get the CPU
  end
end

command :set_hostname do |c|
  c.action do |global,options,args|
    # => set hostname
  end
end

David, thank you very much for a quick reply. I’ll explore these two options.

Does GLI 2.5 support multi-level command suites? If so, are any examples on how to use this feature available?

Yes! GLI2 does support what you are trying to do. You basically nest command blocks inside one another. This code walktrough: http://davetron5000.github.com/gli/todo.html is a decent example, but post back here if you aren’t sure how to proceed.

Thanks for the helpful documentation. Nested command blocks work as advertised.