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Comment by amalgamated_inc | Hacker News Reader

I rewrote all my CLI scripts in Elixir, it's best in class IMO. With Mix.install now it's just amazing. Fast, free and simple concurrency, low startup time, great ecosystem, very good system level abstractions and functions in the stdlib.

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I completely agree with GP in that Elixir isn't really _designed_ for CLI tools, but I agree with you that it does happen to be great for it. I don't doubt there are some facilities it lacks that would make ones life easier, but overwhelmingly its standard library is more than sufficient.

Are any of these published or would you share an example?

Nothing published, they're typically not very complex.

Things of interest for CLI stuff:

    #!/usr/bin/env elixir

Use Mix.install like so

    Mix.install([
      {:jason, "~> 1.4"},
    ])

Execute shell commands

    {output, status_code} = System.cmd("ls", ["-la"])

For handling files and paths:

    Path.join/2
    __ENV__.file
    Path.dirname/1
    Path.expand/1
    File.lstat/1
    File.read/1

Parsing arguments

    argv = System.argv()
    OptionParser.parse(argv, [strict: [switch: :boolean], aliases: [s: :switch]])
    exit({:shutdown, status_code}) # for shutting down with an error

For printing colors (from docs)

    iex> IO.ANSI.format(["Hello, ", :red, :bright, "world!"], true)

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