CLI Automation with JXA (JavaScript)

Hi there,

Im trying to automate few CLI commands,

Here is manual way. I open terminal, use a command, which dont response right away but after some time, and then that command ask 2 types of few questions. 1- y/n (i type y or n and without pressing enter it continues to ask next question) 2- second type of question require me to paste a long string and require me to press enter to ask next question

I tried to automate above with macOs's own Terminal but failed as i'm unable to get the content/state of the terminal so i can answer the question accordingly.

Can i achieve this with iTerm2?

Thanks

Coprocesses allow this kind of scripting. Docs are here: https://www.iterm2.com/documentation-coprocesses.html

You could use node.js to write in javascript, although I have never tried using it in this way.

@gnachman Thank you for your prompt reply, is there a step by step tutorial about CoProcesses? As current documentation seems to be for PRO users.

Documentation says Create a Trigger in Prefs>Profiles>Advanced and select Run Coprocess... as the action. Give the script to run as a parameter. Triggers also have Silent Coprocesses, which prevent any output from going to the screen. This is useful for ZModem, for example.

But how do i "give" the script? do i drag drop script file here or type fully qualified path?

What i want is run the documentation provided bash script as coprocess via AppleScript (For now we ignore JavaScript), so how can i achieve that?

Please advise

How do I give the script

You can use the Apple-provided osascript command to run Applescript.

@gnachman thank you again, Sorry if i was not clear earlier, i dont want to run apple script from commandline but opposite. What i'll do is run the applescript from Script Editor, which will run the iTerm2 app and then i want to Tell iTerm2 to run my coprocess. Can you please explain how to achieve this?

changed milestone to %Next Beta

changed milestone to %Review for next version

Ah, you want to launch a coprocess from Applescript. I'm afraid that's not currently possible. I'll keep this open as a feature request.

@gnachman yes please, it'd be great addition.

Now as this feature 'd come in future so ill change my question.

Above picture is using a regular expression, which means this coprocess auto triggers based on RE. I'm not expert with RE so i want to keep things simple.

What i want is run coprocess manually or pressing some button or some command which triggers the coprocesser. After it, that coprocesser take some conditional inputs, and show outputs and finally close in the end

You can assign a keyboard shortcut to run a coprocess:

But unfortunately the inputs are fixed. You can also configure semantic history to run a coprocess when you cmd-click on a filename, and it can use the text you clicked on as context.