Command Line Assistant

Synopsis

The Command Line Assistant powered by RHEL Lightspeed is an optional generative AI assistant available within the RHEL command line interface.

c [--debug] [-h] [-v] [-p] {chat,feedback,history,shell} ...

c options

  • --debug - Enable debug logging information

  • -h, --help - Show help message and exit.

  • -v, --version - Show program version

  • -p, --plain - Enable plain output. This will disable colors, animations, and other rich content.

c chat

Command to ask a question to the LLM

c chat [-h] [-a [ATTACHMENT]] [-i] [-w [WITH_OUTPUT]] [-l] [-d [DELETE]] [--delete-all]
       [-n [NAME]] [--description [DESCRIPTION]]
       [query_string]

c chat positional arguments

  • query_string - The question that will be sent to the LLM (default: )

c chat options

  • -h, --help - show this help message and exit

  • -a ATTACHMENT, --attachment ATTACHMENT - File attachment to be read and sent alongside the query (default: None)

  • -i, --interactive - Start an interactive chat session

  • -w WITH_OUTPUT, --with-output WITH_OUTPUT - Add output from terminal as context for the query. Use 1 to retrieve the latest output, 2 to and so on. First, enable the terminal capture with 'c shell --enable-capture' for this option to work. (default: None)

  • -l, --list - List all chats

  • -d DELETE, --delete DELETE - Delete a chat session. Specify the chat session by its name. (default: )

  • --delete-all - Delete all chats

  • -n NAME, --name NAME - Give a name to the chat session. (default: None)

  • --description DESCRIPTION - Give a description to the chat session. (default: None)

c feedback

Submit feedback about the Command Line Assistant responses and interactions.

c feedback [-h] [--submit]

c feedback options

  • -h, --help - show this help message and exit

  • --submit - Submit feedback (default action)

c history

Manage Conversation History

c history [-h] [--from-chat FROM_CHAT] [-f] [-l] [--filter FILTER] [-a] [-c] [--clear-all]

c history options

  • -h, --help - show this help message and exit

  • --from-chat FROM_CHAT - Specify from which chat we should retrieve the history. Default chat is 'default' (default: default)

  • -f, --first - Get the first conversation from history.

  • -l, --last - Get the last conversation from history.

  • --filter FILTER - Search for a specific keyword of text in the history. (default: None)

  • -a, --all - Get all the conversation history.

  • -c, --clear - Clear the entire history for a given chat. Use –from-chat with its given name to clear that particular history.

  • --clear-all - Clear the entire history.

c shell

Manage shell integrations

c shell [-h] [--enable-capture] [--enable-interactive] [--disable-interactive]

c shell options

  • -h, --help - show this help message and exit

  • --enable-capture - Enable terminal capture for the current terminal session.

  • --enable-interactive - Enable the shell integration for interactive mode on the system. Currently, only BASH is supported. After the interactive was sourced, hit Ctrl + G in your terminal to enable interactive mode.

  • --disable-interactive - Disable the shell integration for interactive mode on the system.

Description

The command line assistant powered by RHEL Lightspeed is an optional generative AI assistant available within the RHEL command line interface. The Command Line Assistant can help with several tasks such as:

*. Answering RHEL related questions
*. Assisting with troubleshooting
*. Assisting with understanding log entries
*. And many other tasks.

The command line assistant provides a natural language interface, and can incorporate information from resources such as the RHEL documentation.

Examples

  • Interacting and asking questions through `c`

    • Asking a simple question

      Asking questions with c is relatively simple. One can start using the program by simply doing:

      $ c "What is RHEL?"

      Alternatively, you can strictly specify that you want a query with:

      $ c chat "What is RHEL?"

      In case a query is not placed, the program will assume that anything that comes after is a potential query. That includes the options for chat as well.

      Alternatively, you can also use --interactive to start an interactive session:

      $ c --interactive

    • Redirecting output to `c`

      If you have any program in your system that is erroring out, or a log file that contain something that you want to understand, you can redirect that output to c and ask the tool to give you an answer on how to solve it:

      $ cat log_with_error.log | c

      If you want to redirect directly from a command, that is also possible with:

      $ my-command | c

      Sometimes, only providing the error output might not be enough. For that, you can combine your redirect output with a question like this:

      $ cat log_with_error.log | c "how do I solve this?"

    • Attaching a file with your question

      Alternatively to redirecting the output, you can attach a file to c with the following:

      $ c --attachment log_with_error.log

      Optionally, you can use the short version:

      $ c -a log_with_error.log

      You can also combine the attachment with a question:

      $ c -a log_with_error.log "how do I solve this?"

      And lastly, you can use redirect output as well:

      echo "how do I solve this?" | c -a log_with_error.log

      However, if you specify a redirect output and a query at the same time that you have an attachment, only the attachment plus the query will be used. The redirect output will be ignored:

      # The redirection output here will be ignored, as the query has precedence over redirection in this scenario.
echo "how do I solve this?" | c -a log_with_error.log "please?"

  • History management

    With command line assistant, you can also check your conversation history. For that, use the following command to retrieve all user history:

    $ c history --all

    If you don’t want all history, you can filter it for either the first or last result with:

    $ c history --first
$ c history --last

    In the case that a more granular filtering is needed, you can filter with keywords your history, like this:

    # This will retrieve all questions/responses that contain the work "selinux"
$ c history --filter "selinux"

    And finally, to start a clean history, you can clear all the user history with:

    $ c history --clear

  • Shell integrations

    With command line assistant, you can also enable shell integrations to help in your experience:

    $ c shell --enable-interactive

    The above command will place a file under ~/.bashrc.d folder that will be sourced by bash after the next time you open up your terminal.

    Currently, we only have one integration that aims to start the interactive mode with a keybind, like the following:

    $ c shell --enable-interactive

# After enabling the interactive, restart your terminal or run
$ source ~/.bashrc

# After the interactive was sourced, you can hit Ctrl + G in your terminal to enable interactive mode.

    If you wish to disable the interactive, it can be done with:

    $ c shell --disabled-interactive

    You can also enable terminal capture to aid in adding context to your queries with:

    # This will create a file under the ~/.local/state/command-line-assistant/terminal.log
$ c shell --enable-capture

    To quit the capture, just press Ctrl + D

Exit Status

0

success

1

general failure

64

incorrect usage

65

incorrect input data

69

a required service was unavailable

70

an internal software error

80

an error occurred in the chat command

81

an error occurred in the shell command

82

an error ocurred in the history command

83

an error occurred in the feedback command

Notes

In the above examples, we mention that one particular use case where redirected output will be ignored. That happens because we have a set of rules defined in order to maintain a correct order of querying. The rules can be seen here:

1. Positional query only -> use positional query
2. Stdin query only -> use stdin query
3. File query only -> use file query
4. Last terminal output -> use last terminal output
5. Stdin + positional query -> combine as "{positional_query} {stdin}"
6. Stdin + file query -> combine as "{stdin} {file_query}"
7. Positional + file query -> combine as "{positional_query} {file_query}"
8. Positional + last output -> combine as "{positional_query} {last_output}"
9. Positional + attachment + last output -> combine as "{positional_query} {attachment} {last_output}"
99. All three sources -> use only positional and file as "{positional_query} {file_query}"

Files

~/.bashrc.d/cla-interactive.bashrc

Bash script to add keyboard binding to enable interactive mode.

~/.local/state/command-line-assistant/terminal.log

State file that captures the terminal screen and store it as json.

Reference

  1. Command line assistant source code: <https://github.com/rhel-lightspeed/command-line-assistant>

Bugs

To submit bug reports, please use the following link: <https://issues.redhat.com/secure/CreateIssueDetails!init.jspa?pid=12332745&priority=10200&issuetype=1&components=12410340>

In case it is a feature request, please use the following link: <https://issues.redhat.com/secure/CreateIssueDetails!init.jspa?pid=12332745&priority=10200&issuetype=3&components=12410340>

See Also

clad(8)