Directives

Directives are special arguments enabling cross cutting features. We've followed the pattern defined by System.CommandLine to provide two directives: Debug & Parse

new AppSettings { EnableDirectives = true }

Directives must be the first argument and will be removed from further processing.

Debug

Sometimes you just need to debug into a process and configuring the debug arguments in VS is too many extra steps.

When you specify [debug], the process id will output to the console and wait for you to attach a debugger.

Attach your debugger to process 24236 ({exe name}).

Parse

Rules for including spaces in arguments and escaping special characters differ from shell to shell. Sometimes it's not clear why arguments are not mapping correctly.

When you specify [parse], the process will exit immediately after printing each argument onto a new line. This enables you to catch cases where the shell did not parse your arguments as expected.

Use [parse:verbose] to see changes after each TokenTransformation(expand-response-files, expand-clubbed-flags, split-option-assignments) to pinpoint which transformation resulted in unexpected changes.