cmd — Support for line-oriented command interpreters

Source code: Lib/cmd.py

The Cmd class provides a simple framework for writing line-oriented command interpreters. These are often useful for test harnesses, administrative tools, and prototypes that will later be wrapped in a more sophisticated interface.

class cmd.Cmd(completekey='tab', stdin=None, stdout=None)

A Cmd instance or subclass instance is a line-oriented interpreter framework. There is no good reason to instantiate Cmd itself; rather, it’s useful as a superclass of an interpreter class you define yourself in order to inherit Cmd’s methods and encapsulate action methods.

The optional argument completekey is the readline name of a completion key; it defaults to Tab. If completekey is not None and readline is available, command completion is done automatically.

The default, 'tab', is treated specially, so that it refers to the Tab key on every readline.backend. Specifically, if readline.backend is editline, Cmd will use '^I' instead of 'tab'. Note that other values are not treated this way, and might only work with a specific backend.

The optional arguments stdin and stdout specify the input and output file objects that the Cmd instance or subclass instance will use for input and output. If not specified, they will default to sys.stdin and sys.stdout.

If you want a given stdin to be used, make sure to set the instance’s use_rawinput attribute to False, otherwise stdin will be ignored.

Changed in version 3.13: completekey='tab' is replaced by '^I' for editline.

Note

Subtle behaviors of cmd.Cmd:

  • Command handler methods (do_<command>) should return True to indicate that the command loop should terminate. Any other return value continues the loop.

  • If the user presses Enter on an empty line, the default behavior is to repeat the last nonempty command entered. This can be disabled by overriding emptyline().

  • If no matching do_<command> method is found, the default() method is called.

  • Exceptions raised inside command handlers are not caught by default and will terminate the command loop unless handled explicitly.

Cmd Objects

A Cmd instance has the following methods:

Cmd.cmdloop(intro=None)

Repeatedly issue a prompt, accept input, parse an initial prefix off the received input, and dispatch to action methods, passing them the remainder of the line as argument.

The optional argument is a banner or intro string to be issued before the first prompt (this overrides the intro class attribute).

If the readline module is loaded, input will automatically inherit bash-like history-list editing (e.g. Control-P scrolls back to the last command, Control-N forward to the next one, Control-F moves the cursor to the right non-destructively, Control-B moves the cursor to the left non-destructively, etc.).

An end-of-file on input is passed back as the string 'EOF'.

An interpreter instance will recognize a command name foo if and only if it has a method do_foo(). As a special case, a line beginning with the character '?' is dispatched to the method do_help(). As another special case, a line beginning with the character '!' is dispatched to the method do_shell() (if such a method is defined).

This method will return when the postcmd() method returns a true value. The stop argument to postcmd() is the return value from the command’s corresponding do_*() method.

If completion is enabled, completing commands will be done automatically, and completing of commands args is done by calling complete_foo() with arguments text, line, begidx, and endidx. text is the string prefix we are attempting to match: all returned matches must begin with it. line is the current input line with leading whitespace removed, begidx and endidx are the beginning and ending indexes of the prefix text, which could be used to provide different completion depending upon which position the argument is in.