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.
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 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 2.3: The stdin and stdout parameters were added.
A Cmd instance has the following methods:
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 member).
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).
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.
All subclasses of Cmd inherit a predefined do_help(). This method, called with an argument 'bar', invokes the corresponding method help_bar(), and if that is not present, prints the docstring of do_bar(), if available. With no argument, do_help() lists all available help topics (that is, all commands with corresponding help_*() methods or commands that have docstrings), and also lists any undocumented commands.
Instances of Cmd subclasses have some public instance variables: