Progaramming: how to add a gui front end to a CL command?

[Derek Broughton]

Pete Holsberg wrote:

>> Derek Broughton wrote:
>>
>>> Pete Holsberg wrote:
>>>
>>>> Bruce Marshall keyed the following on 8/5/2007 5:39 PM:
>>>>> On Sunday 05 August 2007, Pete Holsberg wrote:
>>>>>> It seems to me that it should be fairly simple to add a GUI front
>>>>>> end to a command. Does anyone have a reference (witj examples) for
>>>>>> me?
>>>>> Press Alt-F2 and enter your command. :-)
>>>> Not funny!
>>>>
>>>>> You give no details as to what you want to do.... or your
>>>>> capabilities....
>>>> Pick any command that takes arguments. Produce a front end so that a
>>>> user doesn't have to remember what the choices for arguments are, can
>>>> enter values for the ones he wants, and pass them along to the command.
>>>>
>>>> A little C, a little perl...
>>>>
>>> A little C?? Is Gnome so difficult? In KDE you just create a .desktop
>>> file, and I would have thought in Gnome it would be exactly the same.
>>
>> Damn, that was dumb. Sorry. I was typing while doing other things. Now I
>> feel like I need to write an introspective front end that can figure out
>> what command line arguments a program takes, and present them in a GUI...
> 
> That's OK. But can you tell me what you meant???

Well, I was just thinking about the Alt-F2 method.  If you don't want
anything more than a quick way to invoke a command off the desktop, then
you use .desktop files.  I have to assume that Gnome uses them too, since
many non-KDE apps supply them in the package - but that doesn't help you
choose what options to pass to the program.  Now, a little python that
takes a command name, runs it with --help to find out what its arguments
are, then pops up a window to let you specify those, could be fun :-)
-- 
derek