repl

Runs a command in a REPL. It comes in very handy when dealing with applications that do not ship with a REPL, but could benefit greatly from one (such as git).

Tab completion is available and completes filenames.

Real productivity

Set an alias in your shell's start-up file:

alias rg="repl git"

Instead of typing git ..., type rg once. You'll never go back.

Installation

repl must be installed from PyPI

Detailed usage

Running repl COMMAND ARG1 ARG2... will start the loop. Any line entered will now be appended to COMMAND ARG1 ARG2... and executed. The result is displayed and repl will wait for the next line to be entered.

Try repl --help for a list of options.

Exiting

To quit the REPL, send an EOF symbol (usually done with Ctrl-d on *nix systems, Ctrl-z on Windows).

Command substitution

If you run into a command that needs arguments passed somewhere in between other arguments by passing {} as the argument. It will be replaced with … in the prompt.

$ repl echo Hello, {} - Nice to meet you!
echo Hello, … - Nice to meet you!>> Alice
Hello, Alice - Nice to meet you!
echo Hello, … - Nice to meet you!>> Bob
Hello, Bob - Nice to meet you!
echo Hello, … - Nice to meet you!>>

Simple version

There is a single-file, no dependencies version of repl, namely version 0.1. It can be found at https://github.com/mbr/repl/tree/0.1 It has less features, but installing it is simply a matter of marking the script executable.

Credits

Idea stolen from https://github.com/defunkt/repl, which unfortunately is unmaintained. Originally rewritten because I had issues with stdin/stdout; now it boasts a few extra features (and does not require ruby)