61–70 of 197 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You literally always need -f with -r in a script (unless you want rm to prompt the user), though...
You must have an alias rm='rm -i' lying around. rm doesn't prompt by default (unless you're the owner of the dir, but not its contents). mkdir demodir && touch demodir/{foo,bar} && rm -r demodir
That would make finding and typing the long arguments easier. As it is, it’s easier to type the long arguments in a shell than in an editor.
Combined with use of shellcheck and shfmt working in shell scripting has come a long way in the last couple years. I still feel like BASH is a dead end--the quoting and whitespace issues combined with the bifurcation caused by Apple not shipping Bash 4.0+ make moving to Python probably the better course in 2020.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You literally always need -f with -r in a script (unless you want rm to prompt the user), though...
You must have an alias rm='rm -i' lying around. rm doesn't prompt by default (unless you're the owner of the dir, but not its contents). mkdir demodir && touch demodir/{foo,bar} && rm -r demodir
I could've sworn that -I was the default......
If you're trying to stick to the POSIX standard, you have to use short options for standard commands like grep, since the long options are GNU extensions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds to me like your choice of OS is what makes your life harder...
It makes my life easier in most ways. This is one of the costs. And, again, this still bites whenever using different linux distros.
#!/bin/bash
When writing scripts (CI especially) you'll rarely use, please always use long-flags. It'll save so much headache for the next dev who isn't as up to date with the latest short-hand for az-cli or whatever. When live scripting, feel free to use short.
This is how I write PowerShell scripts. I use full cmdlet names, full argument switch names, and I even specify argument switches to positional arguments. I also do my best to honor common flags like `-WhatIf`, `-Verbose`, and `-ErrorAction`. So I end up with scripts like this: if (-not $(Test-Path -Path "$Path" -PathType Container)) { Write-Error -Message "Path ($Path) does not exist or is not a directory." -Categor…
On the other hand, I've seen some people eschew `%` and `?` in favor of writing `ForEach-Object` and `Where-Object`, which in my opinion is too extreme in the other direction.
BTW, in:
if (-not $(Test-Path -Path "$Path" -PathType Container)) {
As the saying goes, code is typically written once and read thousands of times. It takes you less than a second to write the full flag name (add a few seconds if you need to look it up), but it will likely save at least a few hundred readings the time to look up the flag if they do not already know it. In addition, full flag names contributes "self-documentation" in many cases, and also potentially makes searching ea…
Do you know, without referring to the manpage, exactly what `cp --no-dereference --preserve=links --recursive --preserve=all` does? I don't. I can take some guesses based on the names of the options, but those guesses could very easily miss an important corner case.
Do you know what `cp -a` does? I do.
Great suggestion, but I'd go for a middle ground: use long flags for the long tail, but short flags are fine for stuff that's very commonly used. I think I'll continue to write these: grep -i rm -rf ln -s gzip -v sed -e instead of: grep --ignore-case rm --recursive --force ln --symbolic gzip --verbose sed --expression If you're working on shell scripts, you probably know certain short flags well enough that long flag…
Long flags aren’t just for readability, they also add entropy which contributes defensiveness against typos.