Command-Line Usage

The primary CLI for sphobjinv is implemented using two subcommands of the sphobjinv entrypoint:

  • sphobjinv convert (docs page), which handles conversion of inventories between supported formats (currently zlib-compressed, plaintext, and JSON).

  • sphobjinv suggest (docs page), which provides suggestions for objects in an inventory matching a desired search term.

As of v2.4, sphobjinv also provides an auxiliary entrypoint, sphobjinv-textconv (docs page), which takes one required argument: a path to a file on disk. This entrypoint attempts to instantiate an Inventory with this file and emit its plaintext contents to stdout with no cosmetic whitespace. The following two invocations are thus nearly synonymous:

$ sphobjinv convert plain path/to/objects.inv -

$ sphobjinv-textconv path/to/objects.inv

(Be sure to note the final hyphen in the first command.) The sphobjinv-textconv spelling is less awkward when configuring a Git textconv to allow rendering diffs of objects.inv files in plaintext. See the sphobjinv-textconv entrypoint documentation for more information.

Shell examples in the CLI docs execute from within /tests/resource unless indicated otherwise.

For Python examples:

  • Examples are executed in a sandboxed directory pre-loaded with objects_attrs.inv (from, e.g., here).

  • Path (from pathlib) is imported into the namespace before all tests.

  • cli_run is a helper function that enables doctesting of CLI examples by mimicking execution of a shell command. It is described in more detail here.

  • file_head is a helper function that retrieves the head of a specified file.