this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2024
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Coming back to this with thoughts. What you're describing sounds a lot like a menu tree.
"Press 1 to do this, 2 to do that, 3 to go to submenu A, 4 for B," etc.
1
"You have pressed 1. Do you want to turn on option ABC? [Y / n]"
Y
"Do you want option QWERTY47? [Y/n]"
N
"Are you sure you want to run
notthebees --abc --no-qwerty47
? [Y/n]"N
"Aborted."
It sounds like a standards problem waiting to happen because no two menus will be alike, but hey, things like this can and do exist, and setting one up isn't that hard, only time consuming.
Something like this can kind of be achieved programmatically by unraveling bash completion arguments and loosely parsing terminal help strings.
They aren't all formatted uniformly though, so you'll need to come up with a filtering mechanism to prevent returning garbage. You'll also always be a little out of date...