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[ Fill out Poll ] [ View Poll Results ] [ Discuss Results ]Poll #1630 Command-Line Interfaces
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 4
For folks who use command-line tools: if a command has both a "display version number" option and a "more verbose output" option, which of these is more intuitive (and/or less likely to be annoying)?
-v = version; -V = verbose
1 (25.0%)
-V = version; -v = verbose 3 (75.0%)
Doesn't matter; either is good 0 (0.0%)
Ew, both suck; use getopt_long() and spell it out 0 (0.0%)
Er, what? Ooh, clicky! 0 (0.0%)
People still bother with command-line interfaces?
(warning: I may mock you if you click this) 0 (0.0%)
If some combinations of command-line arguments might produce not-completely-obvious results, but those combinations are potentially useful so they should merely be warned about rather than disallowed, which of these seems more useful?
-w to turn on warnings for the least obvious dangers;
-W to add warnings just for folks not yet acclimated
to the joys of Unixy deliciousness 1 (25.0%)
-w to turn on wanrnings of all possibly confusing
combinations detected; -W to warn only about severe
gotchas 0 (0.0%)
All warnings on by default, with "did you really mean
that?" prompts, unless the user turns them off
with an "I know what I'm doing" option 1 (25.0%)
Only warn about data-destroying potential-gaffes,
and treat mere potential-inconveniences as "they
probably meant to do that 1 (25.0%)
I'm not sure ... but ooh, clicky! 1 (25.0%)
Let's say you have a bunch of files in a directory (say, "arbeau.abc", "machaut.abc", and "frtrad.abc" in a directory named "french") and some or all are hard-links to (not copies of) entries in another directory (perhaps "french/arbeau.abc" also appears as "dance/arbeau.abc" and "french/machaut.abc" is the same file as "songs/machaut.abc") ... and you decide to modify all the files in that directory ("french") in a batch, using a tool that replaces files with edited versions and optionally saves backups (named *.bak or *~). Which of these sounds like the most correct behaviour (most likely to be desired, least likely to induce cursing)?
Copy each file to its backup-name, then
overwrite the original with the edited
version (so dance/arbeau.abc is still linked to
french/arbeau.abc and thus reflects the changes).
This is what links are for. 2 (50.0%)
Heck, not only that, but it should try to ensure
that symbolic links behave as much like hard
links as possible in cases like this. 1 (25.0%)
Rename each file to its backup-name, then create a new file with the original name for the edited version (dance/arbeau.abc is now linked to french/arbeau.bak, and french.abc is a completely new file with no other links to it). 0 (0.0%)
Make it yet another command-line option, to choose between copy/overwrite and rename/create, and/or prompt the user to choose. 0 (0.0%)
It doesn't matter, because the only users likely to be using links that way in the first place are going to try it out with a couple of dummy files first to find out which way you're doing it. 1 (25.0%)
Wait, what's a "hard link"? Is that like an alias?[*] 0 (0.0%)