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Comment by etaioinshrdlu | Hacker News Reader

Cool! I'm wondering if there's any possible way to automatically generate GUI's for command line applications. Including all the supported arguments.

Some type of crawler would interact with a program, parse its --help output, man page, or any other info available, to enumerate all possible options and their formatting.

It sounds like a really messy program considering how inconsistent CLI's are.

Anyways, a GUI could help massively with discoverability.

Such a tool could help bridge the gap a little between GUI and CLI.

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Barring that, a community-curated repo of interfaces for common applications would also be great. You could just have a wrapper that automatically downloads the applicable config files on the fly.

I can’t see how that would handle any of the hard bits (like dependencies between arguments, mutual exclusion)...

To the extent the command-line program returns proper exit codes, or gives other hints via its output/side-effects as to whether it did anything useful, I could see it working up-to-a-point.

Discovering exclusive options, or options that must be specified together, sound like exactly the sorts of things it could deduce, when every invocation with/without certain pairs of options fails.

Perhaps wrapper-utilities like 'Gooey' or some sort of automated-probing could encourage a greater formalization for specifying de-facto command-line APIs. Then, command-line programs might want to offer not just the human-interpretable help texts and docs, but more rigorous usage-specs that could drive automatic wrappers.

Probing at options sounds dangerous. There is no guarantee at all that attempted invocations won't change state.

I wouldn't wanna let it probe 'rm' :D

Perhaps the probing could happen in a VM / container image which would reset after each invocation.

You'd of course do it inside a controlled environment, via virtualization or similar technologies which let you monitor, veto, or roll-back anything the analyzed program does. (And if it's malicious/sneaky enough to escape that, then it wasn't safe to use in a manual fashion, either.)

Someone above posted this: https://github.com/google/python-fire

seems you could generate something with fire tool and then parse it dynamically with Gooey.

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