31–40 of 85 posts
The worst: I used to work with an awful custom-built industrial computer.
You had to enter the 10-character alphanumeric codes of 98 rail cars into a command-line interface that didn't permit backspacing. One mistake. Car 97. Do it all again.
1. They used differing return values for success and failures. Sometimes, a 0 was a success, sometimes 1 was a success, and sometimes only 4 was a failure, but everything else was a success.
2. They used different command-line switch formats. Some utilities used a hyphen, others used a forward slash.
Why is nobody hating on megacli? It's the only tool I use where I actually need a wrapper script. There are other horrible command line experiences, but nothing anyone here listed I would describe as horrible...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
tar -czf ./file.tgz ./* edit: i do hope that is correct without checking :-)
So the dash in `-czf` if optional? Which reminds me: why does ps have two sets of options again?
- UNIX options, which may be grouped and must be preceded by a dash.
- BSD options, which may be grouped and must not be used with a dash.
- GNU long options, which are preceded by two dashes.
Not the worst (I think `tar` and `unzip` probably take the cake) but `find` is pretty atrocious IMO. The order in which you specify certain flags like `-maxdepth` relative to other option flags matters (not just relative to plain arguments, but relative to other option flags starting with `-`).
If you mean TUI wise as in curses, nearly all of them.
Command line parameters however, there are so many examples. Tar, unrar and unzip take the cake, all in the same category of tools. "unrar x" whatever it is, I always have to look it up. dd because of the way its parameters are specified: dd if=/dev/zero of=foo.bar bs=4096 count=1024 . It's all historical and I can live with it, but many of them at least have the saving grace that they have excellent manpages or you've used them so often it becomes second nature.
There should be a special place in hell for tools that combine short and long style command line options with a single dash. Like "foo -b a -r -baz 123" with "-baz" being a single option, because I will automatically add an extra dash there out of habit.
Coworkers discovering ncurses or some library around it tend to go on a TUI frenzy for a while, and it inevitably ends up being some convoluted mess nobody wants to use. I'll admit there's a few indispensable curses based tools, for instance top (and some variants along that line), but they're far and few in between. At most dialog comes to mind for dealing with prompts for end users, but I personally abhor it in anything but a setup or installation context.
Those very same coworkers also make tools with indecipherable command line options, often because they don't know the language they're working in has a standardized option parser library or module.
> best
I don't remember which tool it was, it could be "crm" (for failover, think like heartbeat and pacemaker) but I might be mistaken. It's been years since I've used it. The command line had options like so:
tool [options] section action resource_src resource_tgt
But the best part was, if you just started the tool without any options, it'd drop you into a pseudo-shell. It'd show you a blank prompt ending in ">". If you then typed "section" you'd end up with a "section>" prompt.
I remember for what I was doing with it, it felt really intuitive. At any point I could type "help section" and it'd list the available actions for that section, together with short example.
I've forgotten the real syntax, but you'd have commands like:
tool node status
tool node standby servername
tool service stop dns
tool service migrate dns secondary
If you were in the pseudo-shell, you could do:
$ service
service$ migrate dns secondary
service$ up
$ node
node$ status
node$ exit
Nearly everything that packs or unpacks stuff. tar, gunzip, and else. I can never remember if they are going to unpack everything into a subdirectory or spill everything into my home, and conversely I never know if after zipping there's gonna be a directory inside or not. Luckily dtrx and atool do the thing you want most of the time. From the time I was a teen I think I remember that mount was difficult to use, and m…