commandline(1)

NAME
commandline - set or get the current command line buffer

  Synopsis

commandline [OPTIONS] [CMD]

  Description
commandline can be used to set or get the current contents of the command line buffer.

With no parameters, commandline returns the current value of the command line.

With CMD specified, the command line buffer is erased and replaced with the contents of CMD.

The following options are available:

•   -C or --cursor set or get the current cursor position, not the contents of the buffer. If no argument is given, the current cursor position is printed, otherwise the argument is interpreted as the new cursor position.

•   -f or --function inject readline functions into the reader. This option cannot be combined with any other option. It will cause any additional arguments to be interpreted as readline functions, and these functions will be injected into the reader, so that they will be returned to the reader before any additional actual key presses are read.

The following options change the way commandline updates the command line buffer:

•   -a or --append do not remove the current commandline, append the specified string at the end of it

•   -i or --insert do not remove the current commandline, insert the specified string at the current cursor position

•   -r or --replace remove the current commandline and replace it with the specified string (default)

The following options change what part of the commandline is printed or updated:

•   -b or --current-buffer select the entire buffer, including any displayed autosuggestion (default)

•   -j or --current-job select the current job

•   -p or --current-process select the current process

•   -s or --current-selection selects the current selection

•   -t or --current-token select the current token

The following options change the way commandline prints the current commandline buffer:

•   -c or --cut-at-cursor only print selection up until the current cursor position

•   -o or --tokenize tokenize the selection and print one string-type token per line

If commandline is called during a call to complete a given string using complete -C STRING, commandline will consider the specified string to be the current contents of the command line.

The following options output metadata about the commandline state:

•   -L or --line print the line that the cursor is on, with the topmost line starting at 1

•   -S or --search-mode evaluates to true if the commandline is performing a history search

•   -P or --paging-mode evaluates to true if the commandline is showing pager contents, such as tab completions

  Example
commandline -j $history[3] replaces the job under the cursor with the third item from the command line history.

If the commandline contains

> echo $flounder >&2 | less; and echo $catfish

(with the cursor on the 'o' of 'flounder')

Then the following invocations behave like this:

> commandline -t
$flounder
> commandline -ct
$fl
> commandline -b  # or just commandline
echo $flounder >&2 | less; and echo $catfish
> commandline -p
echo $flounder >&2
> commandline -j
echo $flounder >&2 | less