trouble with cmd.Cmd and prompting

[Cameron Simpson]

On 03Jan2017 00:14, Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed at ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>On Tue, 3 Jan 2017 11:33:15 +1100, Cameron Simpson <cs at zip.com.au>
>declaimed the following:
>>I'm using cmd.Cmd to write a little FTP-like command line to interface to a
>>storage system of mine and encountering weird behaviour. When I enter a command
>>the next prompt appears _before_ the associated operation runs, or so it
>>appears.
>	<SNIP>
>>Has anyone seen this kind of thing before?
>
>	Haven't used the module but there is something I find intriguing in the
>help system
>-=-=-=-=-
> Cmd.precmd(line)
>    Hook method executed just before the command line is interpreted, but
>after the input prompt is generated and issued.
>-=-=-=-=-
>"... AFTER the input prompt is ... issued"
>
>	I don't know, but that sure sounds to me like the cmd object tends to
>process one line behind... Though that behavior is not shown in the turtle
>example in the help system.

Hmm. Interesting. I had read that text to imply (based on what I imagined 
_should_ happen) that the flow of control went:

  cmdloop:
    issue prompt>
    line=input()  # or readline
    line=precmd(line)
    stop=onecmd(line) # which calls do_blah...
    stop=postcmd(stop,line)
    if stop:
      break

but your reading of it suggests that this is possible:

  issue prompt>
  cmdloop:
    line=input()  # or readline
    issue prompt>
    line=precmd(line)
    stop=onecmd(line) # which calls do_blah...
    stop=postcmd(stop,line)
    if stop:
      break

The text for Cmd.cmdloop starts with this:

  Repeatedly issue a prompt, accept input, parse an initial prefix off the 
  received input, and dispatch to action methods, passing them the remainder of 
  the line as argument.

which argues for the former, and was what I naively expected.

I guess I'd better dig out the source; I dislike going that far, not merely out 
of laziness, but also because the source is not the spec.

Thanks for the suggestion,
Cameron Simpson <cs at zip.com.au>