cli-shell

The top-level command-line interface for the aspens tool. It parses commands, shows the welcome screen, routes work to the right handlers, and presents errors clearly.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to invoke aspens commands, expose its programmatic API, warn about missing Claude hooks, and handle command errors and exit codes.
Why use it?
Users need one consistent entry point for the tool, including predictable command handling and readable failures.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/aspenkit/aspens/cli-shell
Any agent
npx skills add aspenkit/aspens --skill cli-shell
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/aspenkit/aspens

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 27 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,054 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00027 $0.01054
Opus 5 $0.00014 $0.00527
Sonnet 5 $0.00005 $0.00211
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00105

Measured yesterday against content hash 52ba8f08862e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

cli-shell scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

.agents/skills/cli-shell/SKILL.md · 54 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 54 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

You are working on the CLI shell — the entry point that wires Commander subcommands, prints the welcome screen, warns about missing Claude hooks, dispatches to handlers, and translates CliError into a clean exit. Also the public programmatic surface re-exported from src/index.js.

Domain purpose

This layer is what a user actually invokes (aspens …) and what programmatic consumers import. It owns argument parsing, top-level error handling, and the welcome UX. All real work lives in src/commands/*.js — the shell only routes.

Business rules / invariants

  • Handlers must throw CliError, never call process.exit(). The top-level handler in bin/cli.js:250 catches it, prints Error: <message> (unless logged: true) in red, and exits with err.exitCode (default 1). Plain Error falls through to the same printer but always exits 1.
  • logged: true means "I already printed a user-friendly message" — top level then exits silently with the given code. Use it when the handler rendered a clack outro or multi-line failure already.
  • checkMissingHooks(repoPath) runs before doc sync, add, and customize — warns (does not throw) when .claude/skills/ exists but .claude/hooks/skill-activation-prompt.sh or .claude/skills/skill-rules.json is absent. Skipped entirely when .claude/skills/ is missing (nothing to activate).
  • No-command invocation shows showWelcome() — listing essential commands, generate/sync, Claude add-ons, utilities, options, typical workflow, and target notes. Adding a new subcommand requires updating this screen too.
  • Template counts in the welcome are filesystem-derivedcountTemplates(subdir) reads src/templates/{agents,commands,hooks} and filters dotfiles; returns '?' on read failure (never throws).
  • Version comes from package.json at runtime via readFileSync; falls back to '0.0.0' silently if parse/read fails. Do not hardcode.
  • Numeric option parsers throw InvalidArgumentError (Commander-native) — parsePositiveInt rejects ≤0/NaN; parseCommits additionally caps at 50.
  • Signal handlers exit with conventional codes — SIGINT→130, SIGTERM→143. Used to clean up spawned claude -p / codex exec children.

Read the full file on GitHub · 54 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. yesterday First seen · 54 lines · 27 tokens per session scan A 52ba8f08862e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

cli-shell is a skill published in the GitHub repository aspenkit/aspens (96 stars, last pushed 16d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 27 tokens to every session and 1,054 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.