box

Problem

box gathers the small jobs I do in PowerShell 7 on Windows into one command: hashing a file, making a UUID, flattening a folder, renaming a batch of files. v1.0 put 23 tools in one Rust binary. v2.0 made them scriptable: JSON output that ConvertFrom-Json reads, --clip for the clipboard, and defaults in a config file.

Pipeline

1. 01

   Settings

   A flag beats an environment variable, which beats the config file, which beats the built-in default.

2. 02

   Command

   One of the 23 tools runs with those settings.

3. 03

   Output

   Plain text for people, --json for the next command, --clip for the clipboard.

Safety

Commands that delete, move or rename files run as a preview by default: box shows what it would do and renames, moves or deletes nothing until you add --force. box checks the whole job before it changes the first file.

❯ box bulk-rename ./sample '^(.*)\.txt$' '$1.md'
  - copies (skipped: directory)
  ~ hut.txt   -> hut.md
  ~ zmutt.txt -> zmutt.md

Dry run: 2 to rename, 0 unchanged, 1 skipped. Re-run with --force to apply.

With --force, box would rename hut.txt to hut.md and zmutt.txt to zmutt.md, and leave the copies folder alone.

Metrics

Tools

23

Tools in the README at v2.0, plus config and completions Source

Tests

507

At the v2.0 milestone Source

Binary

1

All tools ship in one executable Source

Demo

Four commands I ran with box, replayed with the output they returned.

Stack