CliWrap

CliWrap is a library for interacting with command line executables in a functional manner. It provides a convenient model for launching external processes, redirecting inputs and outputs, awaiting completion, and handling cancellation. At its core, it's based on a very robust piping model that lets you create intricate execution setups with minimal effort.

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NuGet: dotnet add package CliWrap

Features

Airtight abstraction over System.Diagnostics.Process
Fluent interface for configuring commands
Flexible support for piping with variety of sources and targets
Fully asynchronous and cancellation-aware API
Designed with strict immutability in mind
Safety against typical deadlock scenarios
Tested on Windows, Linux, and macOS
Works with .NET Standard 2.0+, .NET Core 2.0+, .NET Framework 4.6.1+
No external dependencies

Usage

Looking for documentation for CliWrap v2.5? You can find it here. For v2.5 to v3.0 migration guide check out the wiki.

Executing a command
Executing a command with buffering
Configuring commands
Executing a command as an event stream
Piping
Timeout and cancellation
Getting process ID of an executing command
Lazily mapping the result of an execution

Executing a command

The following is a basic example that shows how to execute a command with the specified command line arguments:

using CliWrap;

var result = await Cli.Wrap("path/to/exe")
    .WithArguments("--foo bar")
    .ExecuteAsync();

// Result contains:
// -- result.ExitCode        (int)
// -- result.StartTime       (DateTimeOffset)
// -- result.ExitTime        (DateTimeOffset)
// -- result.RunTime         (TimeSpan)

The code above spawns a child process and then asynchronously waits for it to exit. After the task is completed, you get a CommandResult object that contains the exit code and runtime information.

By default, CliWrap pipes stdin, stdout, stderr to its own equivalent of /dev/null, to avoid potential deadlocks and unnecessary memory allocations. This is perfect for use cases where you just want to run a command and don't really care about its interactions with the console.

Commands are also completely stateless (as far as CliWrap is concerned) and can be executed as many times as needed. Every call to ExecuteAsync() spawns a new process:

var cmd = Cli.Wrap("path/to/exe").WithArguments("--foo bar");

// Run the command 5 times in a row
for (var i = 0; i < 5; i++)
    await cmd.ExecuteAsync();

Note: unless configured otherwise, ExecuteAsync() (and other execution models) will throw an exception if the underlying process returns a non-zero exit code, as it usually indicates at an error during execution. You can choose to disable this check if you want.

Executing a command with buffering

In some scenarios you may need to execute a command and also extract the data it has written to the console. There are many ways to do that with CliWrap, one of which is to execute the command with buffering:

using CliWrap;
using CliWrap.Buffered;

var result = await Cli.Wrap("path/to/exe")
    .WithArguments("--foo bar")
    .ExecuteBufferedAsync();

// Result contains:
// -- result.StandardOutput  (string)
// -- result.StandardError   (string)
// -- result.ExitCode        (int)
// -- result.StartTime       (DateTimeOffset)
// -- result.ExitTime        (DateTimeOffset)
// -- result.RunTime         (TimeSpan)

This execution model is very similar to ExecuteAsync(), but in this case the stdout and stderr streams are piped to in-memory buffers, instead of being completely ignored. You can see what the command wrote to those streams by inspecting the StandardOutput and StandardError properties on the returned BufferedCommandResult object.

By default, ExecuteBufferedAsync() will assume that the underlying command uses Console.OutputEncoding for writing text to the console. If needed, it's also possible to override encoding using one of the overloads:

// Treat both stdout and stderr as UTF8-encoded text streams
var result = await Cli.Wrap("path/to/exe")
    .WithArguments("--foo bar")
    .ExecuteBufferedAsync(Encoding.UTF8);

// Treat stdout as ASCII-encoded and stderr as UTF8-encoded
var result = await Cli.Wrap("path/to/exe")
    .WithArguments("--foo bar")
    .ExecuteBufferedAsync(Encoding.ASCII, Encoding.UTF8);

This approach works really well when you want to run a command and also get the output. However, be careful as some CLIs may produce a lot of output and it might be inefficient to store it all in-memory. Additionally, stdout and stderr streams are not necessarily limited to text and can potentially contain binary data. For those more complicated scenarios, it's better to build commands using CliWrap's piping feature instead.

Configuring commands

With the help of CliWrap's fluent interface and multiple overloads, it's really easy to configure various options related to command execution. For example, here are some of the ways you can specify command line arguments:

// Set arguments directly (no formatting, no escaping)
var command = Cli.Wrap("git")
    .WithArguments("commit -m \"my commit\"");

// Set arguments from a list (joined to a string, with escaping)
var command = Cli.Wrap("git")
    .WithArguments(new[] {"commit", "-m", "my commit"});

// Build arguments from parts (joined to a string, with escaping & formatting)
var command = Cli.Wrap("git")
    .WithArguments(a => a
        .Add("commit")
        .Add("-m")
        .Add("my commit"));

While all of these approaches can be used interchangeably, the last two take care of escaping automatically for you, which is useful as you don't have to worry about spaces and other special characters. Moreover, the builder approach can automatically format values like int or double so you don't have to convert them yourself.

Besides command line arguments, you can also configure other aspects, such as environment variables and the working directory:

var command = Cli.Wrap("git")
    .WithWorkingDirectory("path/to/repo/")
    .WithArguments(a => a
        .Add("clone")
        .Add("https://github.com/Tyrrrz/CliWrap")
        .Add("--depth")
        .Add(10))
    .WithEnvironmentVariables(e => e
        .Set("GIT_AUTHOR_NAME", "John")
        .Set("GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL", "john@email.com"));

Additionally, you can call WithValidation() to configure whether the command will throw an exception in case the execution finishes with a non-zero exit code:

var commandNoCheck = Cli.Wrap("git").WithValidation(CommandResultValidation.None);
var commandWithCheck = Cli.Wrap("git").WithValidation(CommandResultValidation.ZeroExitCode); // (default)

CliWrap is designed with full immutability in mind, which means that all methods that return Command create a new instance instead of mutating an existing one. This means that you can safely re-use parts of your commands if necessary:

var pullCmd = Cli.Wrap("git")
    .WithWorkingDirectory("path/to/repo/")
    .WithArguments("pull")
    .WithEnvironmentVariables(e => e
        .Set("GIT_AUTHOR_NAME", "John")
        .Set("GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL", "john@email.com"));

var pushCmd = pullCmd.WithArguments("push");

In the above example, pullCmd and pushCmd are distinct objects. They have the same target executable, working directory and environment variables, but different command line arguments.

Executing a command as an event stream

Besides executing a command as a task, CliWrap also supports an alternative model, in which an execution is represented as an event stream. This lets you start a command and react to events it produces as it runs.

Those events are:

StartedCommandEvent -- received just once, when the command starts executing. Contains the process ID.
StandardOutputCommandEvent -- received every time the underlying process writes a new line to the output stream. Contains the text as string.
StandardErrorCommandEvent -- received every time the underlying process writes a new line to the error stream. Contains the text as string.
ExitedCommandEvent -- received just once, when the command finishes executing. Contains the exit code.

There are two ways you can start a command and listen to its events. One of them is through an asynchronous pull-based stream:

using CliWrap;
using CliWrap.EventStream;

var cmd = Cli.Wrap("foo").WithArguments("bar");

await foreach (var cmdEvent in cmd.ListenAsync())
{
    switch (cmdEvent)
    {
        case StartedCommandEvent started:
            _output.WriteLine($"Process started; ID: {started.ProcessId}");
            break;
        case StandardOutputCommandEvent stdOut:
            _output.WriteLine($"Out> {stdOut.Text}");
            break;
        case StandardErrorCommandEvent stdErr:
            _output.WriteLine($"Err> {stdErr.Text}");
            break;
        case ExitedCommandEvent exited:
            _output.WriteLine($"Process exited; Code: {exited.ExitCode}");
            break;
    }
}

The ListenAsync() method starts the command and returns an object of type IAsyncEnumerable<CommandEvent>, which you can iterate over using the await foreach construct introduced in C# 8. In this scenario, back-pressure is performed by locking the pipes until an event is processed, which means there's no buffering of data in memory.

Alternatively, you can also start a command as an observable push-based stream instead:

using CliWrap;
using CliWrap.EventStream;
using System.Reactive;

await cmd.Observe().ForEachAsync(cmdEvent =>
{
    switch (cmdEvent)
    {
        case StartedCommandEvent started:
            _output.WriteLine($"Process started; ID: {started.ProcessId}");
            break;
        case StandardOutputCommandEvent stdOut:
            _output.WriteLine($"Out> {stdOut.Text}");
            break;
        case StandardErrorCommandEvent stdErr:
            _output.WriteLine($"Err> {stdErr.Text}");
            break;
        case ExitedCommandEvent exited:
            _output.WriteLine($"Process exited; Code: {exited.ExitCode}");
            break;
    }
});

In this case, Observe() returns a cold IObservable<CommandEvent> that represents the command execution. You can use the set of extensions provided by Rx.NET to transform, filter, throttle, and otherwise manipulate the stream. There is no locking in this scenario so the data is pushed at the rate it becomes available.

Similarly to ExecuteBufferedAsync(), both ListenAsync() and Observe() have overloads that accept custom encoding.

Piping

Most of the features you've seen so far are based on CliWrap's core model of piping. In fact, ExecuteBufferedAsync(), ListenAsync(), and Observe() are all just extension methods that wrap around piped commands.

The piping feature lets you redirect input and output streams of the underlying process to form a complex execution pipeline. To facilitate that, the Command object has three methods:

WithStandardInputPipe(PipeSource source)
WithStandardOutputPipe(PipeTarget target)
WithStandardErrorPipe(PipeTarget target)

By default, every command is piped from PipeSource.Null and is itself piped to PipeTarget.Null, which are CliWrap's equivalents of /dev/null. You can change that and, for example, have the command pipe its standard input from one file and redirect its standard output to another:

await using var input = File.OpenRead("input.txt");
await using var output = File.Create("output.txt");

await Cli.Wrap("foo")
    .WithStandardInputPipe(PipeSource.FromStream(input))
    .WithStandardOutputPipe(PipeTarget.ToStream(output))
    .ExecuteAsync();

The exact same thing can be expressed in a terser way using pipe operators:

await using var input = File.OpenRead("input.txt");
await using var output = File.Create("output.txt");

await (input | Cli.Wrap("foo") | output).ExecuteAsync();

Just like with other configuration methods, redirecting pipes results in a new immutable object. This protects you from accidentally reusing the same pipes in different commands, as that usually leads to really confusing errors.

Besides raw streams, PipeSource and PipeTarget both have factory methods that let you create different piping abstractions:

PipeSource.Null -- represents an empty pipe source.
PipeSource.FromStream() -- pipes data from any readable stream.
PipeSource.FromBytes() -- pipes data from a byte array.
PipeSource.FromString() -- pipes from a text string (supports custom encoding).
PipeSource.FromCommand() -- pipes data from standard output of another command.
PipeTarget.Null -- represents a pipe target that discards all data.
PipeTarget.ToStream() -- pipes data into any writeable stream.
PipeTarget.ToStringBuilder() -- pipes data as text into StringBuilder (supports custom encoding).
PipeTarget.ToDelegate() -- pipes data as text, line-by-line, into Action<string> or Func<string, Task> (supports custom encoding).
PipeTarget.Merge() -- merges multiple outbound pipes into one.

The pipe operator also has overloads for most of these. Below you can see some examples of what you can do with the piping feature that CliWrap provides.

Pipe a string into stdin:

var cmd = "Hello world" | Cli.Wrap("foo");
await cmd.ExecuteAsync();

Pipe stdout as text into a StringBuilder:

var stdOutBuffer = new StringBuilder();

var cmd = Cli.Wrap("foo") | stdOutBuffer;
await cmd.ExecuteAsync();

Pipe a binary HTTP stream into stdin:

using var httpClient = new HttpClient();
await using var input = await httpClient.GetStreamAsync("https://example.com/image.png");

var cmd = input | Cli.Wrap("foo");
await cmd.ExecuteAsync();

Pipe stdout of one command into stdin of another:

var cmd = Cli.Wrap("foo") | Cli.Wrap("bar") | Cli.Wrap("baz");
await cmd.ExecuteAsync();

Pipe stdout and stderr into those of parent process:

await using var stdOut = Console.OpenStandardOutput();
await using var stdErr = Console.OpenStandardError();

var cmd = Cli.Wrap("foo") | (stdOut, stdErr);
await cmd.ExecuteAsync();

Pipe stdout to a delegate:

var cmd = Cli.Wrap("foo") | Debug.WriteLine;
await cmd.ExecuteAsync();

Pipe stdout into a file and stderr into a StringBuilder:

await using var file = File.Create("output.txt");
var buffer = new StringBuilder();

var cmd = Cli.Wrap("foo") |
    (PipeTarget.ToStream(file), PipeTarget.ToStringBuilder(buffer));

await cmd.ExecuteAsync();

Pipe stdout into multiple files simultaneously:

await using var file1 = File.Create("file1.txt");
await using var file2 = File.Create("file2.txt");
await using var file3 = File.Create("file3.txt");

var target = PipeTarget.Merge(
    PipeTarget.ToStream(file1),
    PipeTarget.ToStream(file2),
    PipeTarget.ToStream(file3)
);

var cmd = Cli.Wrap("foo") | target;
await cmd.ExecuteAsync();

Pipe a string into a command, that command into another command, and then into parent's stdout and stderr:

var cmd = "Hello world" | Cli.Wrap("foo")
    .WithArguments("print random") | Cli.Wrap("bar")
    .WithArguments("reverse") | (Console.WriteLine, Console.Error.WriteLine);

await cmd.ExecuteAsync();

As you can see, piping enables a wide range of different use cases. It's not only used for convenience, but also to improve memory efficiency when dealing with large and/or binary inputs and outputs. With the help of CliWrap's pipe operators, configuring pipelines is really easy -- just imagine doing the same with System.Diagnostics.Process manually.

Of course, if you're not comfortable using pipe operators, you can do everything using the WithStandardXyzPipe() methods instead. They work entirely the same.

The different execution models which we saw earlier, ExecuteBufferedAsync(), ListenAsync() and Observe() are all based on the concept of piping, but these approaches are not mutually exclusive. For example, you can just as easily create a piped command and start it as an event stream:

await using var input = File.OpenRead("input.txt");
await using var output = File.Create("output.txt");

var cmd = input | Cli.Wrap("foo") | output;

await foreach (var cmdEvent in cmd.ListenAsync())
{
    // ...
}

This works because internally these methods call PipeTarget.Merge() to combine new pipes with those configured earlier.

Timeout and cancellation

Command execution is asynchronous by nature because it involves a completely separate process. Often you may want to implement an abortion mechanism to stop the execution before it finishes, either by a manual trigger or a timeout.

To do that with CliWrap, you simply need to pass a CancellationToken that represents the cancellation signal:

using var cts = new CancellationTokenSource();

// Cancel automatically after a timeout of 10 seconds
cts.CancelAfter(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(10));

var result = await Cli.Wrap("path/to/exe").ExecuteAsync(cts.Token);

When an execution is canceled, the underlying process is killed and the ExecuteAsync() method throws an exception of type OperationCanceledException (or its derivative, TaskCanceledException). You will have to catch this exception to recover from cancellation.

Similarly to ExecuteAsync(), cancellation is supported by all execution models, including ExecuteBufferedAsync(), ListenAsync(), Observe().

Getting process ID of an executing command

The promise returned by ExecuteAsync() and ExecuteBufferedAsync() is in fact not Task<T> but CommandTask<T>. It's a special object that similarly can be awaited, but it also contains information about the ongoing execution.

You can inspect the task object and get the ID of the underlying process that is represented by this command execution:

var task = Cli.Wrap("path/to/exe")
    .WithArguments("--foo bar")
    .ExecuteAsync();

var processId = task.ProcessId;

await task;

Lazily mapping the result of an execution

To make it easier to express command execution as a single expression, CliWrap also provides a way to lazily map the result. This can be done by calling Select() either on CommandResult or BufferedCommandResult:

// We're only interested in the exit code
var exitCode = await Cli.Wrap("path/to/exe")
    .WithArguments("--foo bar")
    .ExecuteAsync()
    .Select(r => r.ExitCode);

// We're only interested in stdout
var stdOut = await Cli.Wrap("path/to/exe")
    .WithArguments("--foo bar")
    .ExecuteBufferedAsync()
    .Select(r => r.StandardOutput);

Name		Name	Last commit message	Last commit date
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.github		.github
CliWrap.Benchmarks		CliWrap.Benchmarks
CliWrap.Tests.Dummy		CliWrap.Tests.Dummy
CliWrap.Tests		CliWrap.Tests
CliWrap		CliWrap
.gitattributes		.gitattributes
.gitignore		.gitignore
Changelog.md		Changelog.md
CliWrap.props		CliWrap.props
CliWrap.sln		CliWrap.sln
License.txt		License.txt
Readme.md		Readme.md
favicon.ico		favicon.ico
favicon.png		favicon.png
logo.png		logo.png

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CliWrap

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Features

Usage

Executing a command

Executing a command with buffering

Configuring commands

Executing a command as an event stream

Piping

Timeout and cancellation

Getting process ID of an executing command

Lazily mapping the result of an execution

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