# Writing Your Scripts

The bashly generate command is performing the following actions:

1. Generates placeholder files in the src directory - one file for each of the defined commands in your bashly.yml file. These files are generated only once and are never overwritten.
2. Merges all these partial scripts into a single bash script, and saves it in the root directory of your project.

In order to access the parsed arguments in any of your partial scripts, you may simply access the $args associative array.

For example:

# Generate a minimal configuration:
$ bashly init --minimal

# Generate the bash script:
$ bashly generate

# Run the script:
$ ./download hello --force

# this file is located in 'src/root_command.sh'
# you can edit it freely and regenerate (it will not be overwritten)
args:
- ${args[--force]} = 1
- ${args[source]} = hello

You will notice that all the arguments of the associative array are printed on screen. This is done by the inspect_args function that was inserted into the generated partial script src/root_command.sh.

You can now access these variables by modifying sec/root_command.sh like this:

source_url=${args[source]}
force=${args[--force]}

if [[ $force ]]; then
  echo "downloading $source_url with --force"
else
  echo "downloading $source_url"
fi

After editing the file, run these commands:

# Regenerate the script:
$ bashly generate   # or bashly g for short

# Test its new functionality:
$ ./download a --force

downloading a with --force

In case you wish to add functions that can be used from multiple locations in your code, you can place *.sh files inside the src/lib - these files will be merged as is to the final bash script.

To get a starting point, you can run the convenience command:

$ bashly add lib

Custom Includes Example

Any code within the src/initialize.sh file will be called before anything else in your generated bash script.

In case you wish to replace the header in the generated script, simply put the new content in src/header.sh.

Any comment in your source files that begins with two # symbols, will be removed from the final generated script. This is ideal for adding developer notes that should not be visible to your end users.

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