Crumbs

Crumbs is a command-line utility for the shell, for storing commands under a meaningful name in a hierarchy

Motivation

For web service tests I am used to sending a lot of HTTP Requests via curl. The command line invocation can be quite complex and long and I wanted to be able to organize them in a directory like structure. Also I wanted to have a context sensitive auto completion for the different command invocations.

Why not use aliases?

Aliases do not allow a user to use foward slashes in the alias name in order to create complex hierarchies and therefore no context sensitive auto completion.

Installation

Arch Linux AUR package

For installing crumbs on Arch Linux an AUR package is provided at: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/crumbs/

macOS Homebrew Formula

On macOS you can install crumbs with Homebrew like this:

$ brew install mhubig/crumbs/crumbs

Prerequisites

In order to compile and install crumbs on your local system you the following software must be available on the system:

1. gcc
2. make
3. gzip
4. git

Installation procedure

1. Checkout the sources from github.

git clone https://github.com/fasseg/crumbs.git

2. Run automake to create required files and the configure script. Optionally specify the installation path with --prefix and the path for the config file with --sysconfdir.

cd crumbs
automake --add-missing
./configure --prefix='/usr/local' --sysconfdir='/etc'

3. Compile the program.

make

4. Install the binaries and the man pages.

sudo make install

Configuration file

The default configuration file is /etc/crumbs.conf. It contains the following settings:

path

The path to use for storing data. If the path starts with a forward slash crumbs uses an absolute path to the configuration file. If the path is not starting with a forward slash the current user's home directory is prepended to the path.

A different configuration file can be used by invoking crumbs with the --config option

Auto Completion

An auto completion file for the bash shell is included and installed in /usr/local/share/crumbs/crumbs-completion.bash. In order to enable the completion you can copy the file crumbs-completion.bash to e.g. /usr/local/share/crumbs/ and source in your .bashrc file:

echo "source /usr/local/share/crumbs/crumbs-completion.bash" >> ~/.bashrc

Usage

You can check the help dialog of the program or the man page for usage documentation and some examples:

crumbs --help 
man crumbs