Vincent Stemen schrieb:
Yes, in the traditional layered Unix approach, this tool was specifically designed to be easier to automate and to write interactive front ends than the existing tools. It would probably be easy enough to add a simple interactive mode to the tool itself, but I hesitate to do that because, as you mentioned, I can do the same thing with a shell script, making it easy to tune the interactive behavior and to have multiple different interfaces that are as simple or as sophisticated as you want.
Yes, but the downside of this is that there are two distinct interfaces, one for the tool itself (getopt_long() stuff) and another for the interactive mode which is put on top of it with shell scripts.
A better idea IMO is to have a built-in interactive mode and allow for feeding those commands to the tool also from a file. In the tool it's just a matter of either reading from stdin or from a file.
Sascha -- http://yoyodyne.ath.cx
