Overview

The module provides primitives for command line manipulation.

CommandLineBuilder

CommandLineBuilder class allows you to dynamically build a command line. It provides the built-in support for characters than need escaping.

Semantically CommandLineBuilder is similar to StringBuilder class:

using Gapotchenko.FX.Diagnostics; var clb = new CommandLineBuilder(); clb.AppendParameter("/b"); clb.AppendFileName(@"C:\Temp\Test 1.txt"); clb.AppendFileName(@"C:\Temp\Test 2.txt"); Console.WriteLine(clb.ToString());

The code above produces the following output:

/b "C:\Temp\Test 1.txt" "C:\Temp\Test 2.txt"

Note how some command-line parameters were automatically quoted because they contained whitespace characters.

CommandLineBuilder supports a fluent interface, just like conventional StringBuilder. So the code can be rewritten as:

var clb = new CommandLineBuilder() .AppendParameter("/b") .AppendFileName(@"C:\Temp\Test 1.txt") .AppendFileName(@"C:\Temp\Test 2.txt"); Console.WriteLine(clb.ToString());

The resulting command line can be used in various places, most notably for starting a new process:

using System.Diagnostics; Process.Start("copy", clb.ToString());

CommandLine

CommandLine static class provides operations for command line manipulation.

Build

CommandLine.Build method allows you to quickly build a command-line string from a specified list of arguments. Basically, this is a shortcut to CommandLineBuilder class in a handy functional form:

string commandLine = CommandLine.Build("/b", @"C:\Temp\Test 1.txt", @"C:\Temp\Test 2.txt");

Such a form is very useful in something like this:

Process.Start( "cmd", CommandLine.Build( "/C", "copy", "/b", @"C:\Temp\Test 1.txt", @"C:\Temp\Test 2.txt"));