8 Using the Console Program
Craig Oates edited this page 4 years ago

The console program this repository provides is a traditional .Net 4.7.1 console. It does not come with an installer and I wrote it in F#. On top of that, I built the program with Console.Waterworks (C.W). What that means is you operate the console by entering commands and arguments. From your perspective, this will not feel vastly different from most console programs. Although, there are slight differences and even more in the source code. If you would like to know more about C.W., you can do so by using the following links:

I will assume you have downloaded the console program or cloned the repository and built it. For information on how to get SmoulderingBeachBallCLI on your machine, you can use the following link:

When you start the console, you will see something similiar to the image below.

console at start

From here, you can begin entering commands. Before you do, it is worth pointing out two things. The first is you can see a list of all the available commands by typing "help" into the prompt and pressing ENTER. The second thing is the program has a built-in "cheat-sheet". The quickest way to access it by entering "cheat" into the prompt. When you do that, you will see a cheat-sheet appear on your desktop. You can, also, use the following link:

console with help command

console with cheat-sheet

If you go through the "help" section, in the console or PDF, you will notice most of the commands have input arguments. From your point-of-view, they are typical input types (E.G. int, string). There are limitations, though. The most notable one being the converting from (console) text to other (non-string) types. If you would like to know more about these limitations, I recommend you use the following link:

I will not go into too much detail about the limitation because it is essentially a C.W. concern. And, you should not notice it for the most part. Although, if you are wanting to work with this projects source code, I highly recommend you use the above link.

If you do not want to use the cheat-sheet or the built-in "help" command, you can view the list of available commands with the following link:

After a while, you should start to get proficient with SmoulderingBeachBallCLI. When you do, the command names might start feeling a little clunky and long-winded. If that is the case, you can head over the aliases section. The link for that section is as follows: