Awkward

A NodeJS based shell. Everything is an Object!

Install

npm install -g awkward

Whuuut?

To me, awk is powerful but really weird. Often times I want to get some information out of a command which gives a structured output but I get discouraged because I am really lazy.

Enter, awkward. It's a NodeJS based shell. It lets you run javascript functions on system commands.

For example: ls().forEach(a => console.log(a[0], a[0].length))

One can also use flags and piped commands like this: (ps -ef)().map(a => [a[0], a[7]]).forEach(a => console.log(a))

Update:

Underscore added as a dependency and now you can use it in the awkward terminal

Philosophy

Every structured data given as an output by shell commands or other binaries can be represented as a JS array and one should be able apply Array methods like map, forEach, filter on the data in a functional style.

How it works

Once the program notices that the user wants to run js functions, it runs the command and stores the result in an array. Let's take the example of ps:

Shell output

PID TTY          TIME CMD
13750 pts/14   00:00:00 bash
25193 pts/14   00:00:03 node
25271 pts/14   00:00:00 sh
25272 pts/14   00:00:00 ps

Corresponding array

[ [ 'PID', 'TTY', 'TIME', 'CMD' ],
[ '13750', 'pts/14', '00:00:00', 'bash' ],
[ '25193', 'pts/14', '00:00:03', 'node' ],
[ '25283', 'pts/14', '00:00:00', 'sh' ],
[ '25284', 'pts/14', '00:00:00', 'ps' ] ]

And the functions you pass are evaluated as: resulting_array.<functions_you_pass>.

Which actually is the only supported syntax, for now. One can only chain commands and functions like this: (command).function((elem)=>{})

So, doing console.log(ls()) won't work, for now.

Demo