SideCarCLI | Command Line – description –part 1

There are those days a great deal of command line applications that performs a variety of things. The problem is that you cannot control them . The command line performs their duty well – but,from time to time,you need something else integrated with this.

The pattern for this is https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/patterns/sidecar – it is applied to microservices,but why not applied to command lines ?

So – let’s start this project  with specifications.

Let’s suppose that I want to run an command line application – let name it StartApp. But I want also:

1. Intercept every line of the StartApp that is outputting to the console and run something with that with the line ( send to HTTP endpoint,log somewhere,and so on).
2. Intercept the finish of the StartApp and run something with the output ( either all lines,either with the result of the application)
3. Timers:
   • Do not let the StartApp to run more than an maximum amount of time
   • Run something periodically  with arguments  from the StartApp arguments

The solution is to make another application ( let’s name SideCarCLI ) that runs the  StartApplication.

What it is complicated her is how we pass the arguments of the SideCarCLI versus the arguments of the StartApp .