Readme : add Linux command line example?

[1RedOne]

Hi!

This works great for me in windows dotnet core apps but I cannot get the syntax right for running bash commands, I keep getting 'file not found errors'.

Could we have one or two bash command examples, maybe running apt-get or ifconfig or something?

[madelson]

Hi @1RedOne , are you passing the full path to the executable you are trying to run? For example, /sbin/ifconfig instead of just /ifconfig? One quick test you can do is to try running File.Exists on the same string that you're passing as the first argument to Run(). If File.Exists can't find it then Run() can't typically find it either.

Backlog issue #32 is about adding the abililty to search the system path for files like bash or cmd would do. From experience I've found that sometimes .NET seems to do a variant of this for us on Windows, sometimes not. It's been hard to pin down what the specific behavior is. I haven't explored the linux behavior too much, but it looks like it calls execve which does not seem to do any path searching, so I'd expect that working path is needed.

The other thing to think about is that if you're running bash built-in commands that are not standalone executables then you'll probably need to run these through bash itself. So in that case you'd have something like Command.Run("/path/to/bash", "command", "arg1", ...).

Let me know if that works? Maybe we can work towards some examples that can be added to the docs page?

[1RedOne]

Thanks for the response, you were right about needing to provide the fully qualified path to the binary. On top of that, it turns out that when providing a string of command options to bash, there is some irksome quote management needed, here was the syntax that worked for me.

Command.Run("/path/to/bash", $"-c \"/usr/local/bin/youtube-dl --no-progress {cleanURL}\""),

Note the escaped quote after -c above, and the closing escaped quote. {cleanURL} is just a url that's inserted with string expansion using the $" " syntax.

[madelson]

@1RedOne thanks for following up. A few thoughts on the above:

• Is there a reason to go through bash here? What happens if you just do:

Command.Run("/usr/local/bin/youtube-dl", "--no-progress", cleanUrl);

• If you are going to use bash, I'm a bit surprised to see -c included as part of the single argument. Each argument passed to MedallionShell gets escaped so that the program being run sees it as a separate argument. In this case, we want to pass 2 args: the -c flag and the command line itself /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl --no-progress {cleanURL}. For example the following works for me on Windows. Does it work for you (with your bash path of course)?

Command.Run(@"C:\Program Files\Git\usr\bin\bash.exe", "-c", "echo hi")

• RE: escaping, I wonder if this won't be required if you keep -c separate as suggested above. That way you can take advantage of MedallionShell's native escaping. Where I'd think you WOULD need escaping is if cleanURL happened to have spaces or backslashes in it. Can you try the following and let me know what the result is?

Command.Run("/path/to/bash", "-c", $"/usr/local/bin/youtube-dl --no-progress {cleanURL}");