[Short Tip] Accessing tabular nushell output for non-nushell commands

After I learned how subshells can be executed within nushell I was confident that I could handle that part. But few minutes ago I run into an error I didn’t really understand:

❯ rpm -qf (which dwebp)
error: Type Error
   ┌─ shell:24:16
   │
24 │ rpm -qf (which dwebp)
   │                ^^^^^ Expected string, found row

I thought the parameter was provided somehow in the wrong way, and put it into quotes: "dwebp". But it didn’t help. I tested around more with sub-shells, some of them worked while others didn’t. The error message was misleading for me, letting me think that there is a difference in how the argument is interpreted:

❯ rpm -qi (echo rpm)
Name        : rpm
Version     : 4.16.1.3
Release     : 1.fc34
[...]

❯ echo (which dwebp)
───┬───────┬────────────────┬─────────
 # │  arg  │      path      │ builtin 
───┼───────┼────────────────┼─────────
 0 │ dwebp │ /usr/bin/dwebp │ false   
───┴───────┴────────────────┴─────────

It took me a while until I understood what I was looking at – and to make the error message make sense: the builtin nushell command which can give back multiple results, thus returning a table. The builting nushell command echo returns a string!

Thus the right way to execute my query is to get the content of the cell of the table I am looking at via get:

❯ rpm -qf (which dwebp|get path|nth 0)
libwebp-tools-1.2.1-1.fc34.x86_64

Note that nth 0 is not strictly necessary here since there is only one item in the table anyway. But it might help as a reference for future examples.

You don’t have to use pipe, btw., there is an even shorter way available:

❯ rpm -qf (which dwebp|nth 0).path
libwebp-tools-1.2.1-1.fc34.x86_64

[Short Tip] Executing a subshell in Nushell

I just run through a howto where I was asked to execute a command which used the command output from a subshell as an argument for another command. Copy&paste of such typical command examples don’t work with nushell:

❯ sudo usermod --append --groups libvirt $(whoami)
error: Variable not in scope
  ┌─ shell:9:40
  │
9 │ sudo usermod --append --groups libvirt $(whoami)
  │                                        ^^^^^^^^^ unknown variable: $(whoami)

The right way to do that in nushell is only slightly different – using subexpressions:

❯ sudo usermod --append --groups libvirt (whoami)