Intermediate Base Classes

You may find yourself wanting to create intermediate subclasses for your application, in order to share common functionality. For example, you might create a class for all commands which handle a single file as an argument:

class FileCmd(MyCmd):
    def add_args(self, parser):
        parser.add_args('file', help='the single file')

You can do that, so long as your intermediate subclasses are not executable. For example, given the following class hierarchy:

MyCmd*
|- FileCmd*
|  |- AppendLineCmd
|  |- RemoveLineCmd
|- DoSomethingElseCmd

The non-leaf commands (marked with an asterisk) will not be included as executable commands. Only leaf classes will be executable.

Default Command

When the user does not provide any argument on the command-line, the default action is to raise an Exception which states “you must select a sub-command”. You can provide a default command to run instead, via the default argument to main() (or add_subcommands()). For example:

if __name__ == '__main__':
    MyCmd.main('description', default='help')

The above code will run the help subcommand when no subcommand is specified. Note that in this case, the default sub-command may not receive all of its expected arguments.

Shortest Prefix Aliasing

subc has an optional feature which allows the user to specify a subcommand by the shortest prefix which uniquely identifies the subcommand, or any longer prefix thereof. As an example, imagine a git command with the following sub-commands: clone, checkout, commit, cherry-pick. The shortest prefix aliasing would allow you to run “git clone” by executing git cl, since only “clone” begins with “cl”. You could also execute “git clone” with a longer prefix like git clo. The feature can be enabled by setting shortest_prefix to true in main() or add_subcommands().