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Comment by tomc1985 | Hacker News Reader

tomc1985

> wrapping CLI commands to turn them into APIs/make them programmable

CLI apps are already very programmable. How would you API-ify them even more?

  system('yourapp --option1 --option2=something')

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Avoiding entire classes of escaping/parsing vulnerabilities.

By burying them in the framework....

Yes, exactly, just like database query processing in ORM systems and the like "buries" SQL injection countermeasures in a single place. It's a good thing.

There's abstraction confusion here, though. All SQL injection countermeasures and all it would take to protect the above CLI call is respecting the actual language you're using. That is, not gluing a query/command from strings.

Starting a subprocess via shell is could in particular be solved by a simple API of the form of:

  system('yourapp', ['option1', {'option2' : 'something'}]);

in your favourite language. Handling pipes and redirects gets more complex, but I see no prima facie reason why it couldn't look like this:

  pipe(system('yourapp', ['option1', {'option2' : 'something'}]),
       system('grep', ['n', 'i', 'foobar']),
       system('somethingelse', [], null, file("/dev/null")));

This assumes the --option=value syntax which while a de-facto standard on Unix-like systems is unfortunately not supported by all programs.

I agree that system() (in C and other langues that simply copied it) is a bad API. For shell escaping a command to start a process with a list of arguments would be enough, and even POSIX C has you covered there with vararg and array variants. [1]

[1] http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/posix_spawn.3.html (or fork() + exec())

Input and output types would be a good start.

--output=json

That isn't a type, but I like the direction you're going.

Powershell kinda does this, but people are still debating if it's a good thing or not.

(personally, I think it is, and helps give structure to the sometimes too "dynamic" world that is shell scripting)

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