try

"Do, or do not. There is no try."

We're setting out to change that.

Description

try lets you run a command inside an overlay without modifying the state of the filesystem. While using try you can choose to commit the result to the filesystem or completely ignore it without any side-effect to the main file system.

Getting Started

Dependencies

• Ubuntu 18.04 LTS or later

Installing

Clone this repository:

git clone https://github.com/binpash/try.git

Optionally, consider adding the try directory to PATH.

echo 'export PATH="<path_to_try_directory>:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc

Example Usage

The general workflow is to try a command before commiting its results to your workspace.

To uncompress a gzip file, you can invoke try as follows:

try gunzip file.txt.gz

By default, try will ask you to commit the changes made at the end of its execution.

Changes detected in the following files:

/tmp/tmp.0caZdxnHuR/upperdir/home/me/file.txt
/tmp/tmp.0caZdxnHuR/upperdir/home/me/file.txt.gz

Commit these changes? [y/N] y

Sometimes, you might want to pre-execute a command and commit its result at a later time. Invoking try with the -n flag will return the overlay directory, wothout committing the result.

try -n gunzip file.txt.gz

Alternatively, you can specify your own overlay directory as follows (note that try_dir already exists):

try -D try_dir gunzip file.txt.gz

You can inspect the changhes made inside a given overlay directory:

try summary try_dir

You can also choose to commit the overlay directory contents:

try commit try_dir

Version History

• 0.1
  • Initial Release

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see LICENSE.md for details.

Copyright (c) 2023 The PaSh Authors.