Re: [ANN] camlish: a simple module for shell scripting in OCaml

[Zheng Li <zheng_li@users.sourceforge.net>]

Mikkel Fahnøe Jørgensen wrote:
> Great!, but bummer, I wrote one too last night....
> 
> http://git.dvide.com/pub/ocaml-shell-utils/tree/
> http://git.dvide.com/pub/ocaml-shell-utils/plain/README.txt
> 
> Also looked at FileUtils and ShCaml, but wanted something light.
> 
> Anyway - it seems orthogonal to mine.
> 
> I don't do any pipeline processing, I just make it easy to cp, mv,
> etc. using ocaml toplevel scripts as an alternative to install
> scripts.

I just had a visit to your project, and yes, I agree they are mostly
orthogonal. Camlish only concentrates on the interaction, redirection,
composition and coordination of _external_ commands, pushing/pulling the
input/output as OCaml values. It doesn't, and probably won't, define
functions as common shell commands by itself, which, I believe, are
better left to other libraries.

As a compensation, camlish allows one to execute shell commands directly
from toplevel, if (s)he doesn't care about the interaction with OCaml
world. So instead of writing

   # !! cmd "ls -l";;

which is plain OCaml function calling outside command "ls", one can
simply write

   # ls -l ;;

which is a shell command, not a function named "ls". I myself am
interested in using OCaml toplevel as a shell environment.

Still, it's very nice to see others confronting similar problems and
trying to solve them in different approaches.

--
Zheng