Overload – customize your commands

FOR THE CURRENT VERSION OF OVERLOAD, see the khamer/bin repository instead.

Overview

Overload started out with three goals:

• add better default behavior to commands that have poor default behavior,
• enhance existing options/flags for commands, and
• add additional functionality to existing commands in a way that is more natural to use.

It can be called directly – overload svn ls – or configured in your .bashrc file. It can also be setup using symbolic links, but I generally discourage that now.

Defining commands

The easiest way to define commands is by creating a .overloadrc file in your home directory. In this file, you should define bash functions that match the underscorized verison of command you'd like to match. For example,

svn_add() {
	if [ -z "$1" ]; then
		ARGS=$(svn st | awk '/^\?/{print $2}' | xargs)
		if [ -n "$ARGS" ]; then
			$original_command add $ARGS
		fi
	else
		$original_command add "$@"
	fi
}

I've provided one of my own .overloadrc files to show some examples. For example, I have defined

• svn us – runs svn up and status
• svn commit – I force an svn up before every commit
• svn ct – give it a ticket number, and it commits with the message "Completed Ticket #"

Currently, I assume bash.

Configuring commands to always use overload

After adding overload to your path, you can simply add

source overload svn hg

To the bottom of your .bashrc (or equivalent.) For the .overloadrc I shared, I only overloaded 'svn' and 'hg', so those are the only two I have configured in my .bashrc.