Looking for a way to wrap a command and give its own shell

Question

I am working with the command line executing the same commands many times manually following the same pattern. Now I am looking for a way to simplify it by just typing the command only once.

Lets take a look at a normal docker example:

docker ps
docker ps -a
docker ps -l
docker stop x 
docker start x 
docker start y 
docker logs y
docker logs -f z

This example also applies to many more commands such as git, brew, gulp, gcloud.

Now I am looking for some sort of a command wrapper shell, that allows me to write with docker that will wraps any command in a nested/sub shell.

Then I don't need to prepend the docker command and just call:

>ps
# does docker ps and displays result 
>stop x
# prepends docker so docker stop x is actually executed   
CTRL+C # to exit the command wrapper 

Does something like this already exist? I was googling for it but could not describe it properly hence I didn't find anything.

Answer 1

You could also define a function yourself, and include it in your .bash_profile or similar:

function with {
    echo -n "$1> "
    while read input
    do
        if [[ $input == "exit" ]]
        then
            break
        fi
        eval "$1 $input"
        echo -n "$1> "
    done
    echo
}

Example usage:

user@host $ with git
git> status
# On branch master
nothing to commit (working directory clean)
git> exit

user@host $

EDIT: This function does not do input sanitization or anything, so use at your own risk etc...

Answer 2

You could write a bash or other shell script to do this. An easy alternative that's almost as good would be just to define short aliases and prepend them, for example

alias d=docker
alias g=gcloud

and so on. Then run

d ps
d ps -a

and so on, which is hardly more work than typing just the commands.