Is there a way to unpack a config file to cli flags in general? - bash

Question

Basically what foo(**bar) does in python, here I’d want something like
foo **bar.yaml
and that would become
foo --bar1=1 --bar2=2
Where bar.yaml would be
bar1: 1
bar2: 2

Answer 1

You could use a combination of sed and xargs:
sed -E 's/^(.+):[[:space:]]+(.+)$/--\1=\2/' bar.yaml | xargs -d '\n' foo
sed converts the format of bar.yaml lines (e.g. bar1: 1 -> --bar1=1) and xargs feeds the converted lines as arguments to foo.
You could of course modify/extend the sed part to support other formats or single-dash options like -v.
To test if this does what you want, you can run this Bash script instead of foo:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
echo "Arguments: $#"
for ((i=1; i <= $#; i++)); do
echo "Argument $i: '${!i}'"
done

Answer 2

Here's a version for zsh. Run this code or add it to ~/.zshrc:
function _yamlExpand {
setopt local_options extended_glob
# 'words' array contains the current command line
# yaml filename is the last value
yamlFile=${words[-1]}
# parse 'key : value' lines from file, create associative array
typeset -A parms=("${(#s.:.)${(f)"$(<${yamlFile})"}}")
# trim leading and trailing whitespace from keys and values
# requires extended_glob
parms=("${(kv#)${(kv#)parms##[[:space:]]##}%%[[:space:]]##}")
# add -- and = to create flags
typeset -a flags
for key val in "${(#kv)parms}"; do
flags+=("--${key}='${val}'")
done
# replace the value on the command line
compadd -QU -- "$flags"
}
# add the function as a completion and map it to ctrl-y
compdef -k _yamlExpand expand-or-complete '^Y'
At the zsh shell prompt, type in the command and the yaml file name:
% print -l -- ./bar.yaml▃
With the cursor immediately after the yaml file name, hit ctrl+y. The yaml filename will be replaced with the expanded parameters:
% print -l -- --bar1='1' --bar2='2' ▃
Now you're set; you can hit enter, or add parameters, just like any other command line.
Notes:
This only supports the yaml subset in your example.
You can add more yaml parsing to the function, possibly with yq.
In this version, the cursor must be next to the yaml filename - otherwise the last value in words will be empty. You can add code to detect that case and then alter the words array with compset -n.
compadd and compset are described in the zshcompwid man page.
zshcompsys has details on compdef; the section on autoloaded files describes another way to deploy something like this.