[TUHS] Systematic approach to command-line interfaces [ meta issues ]

[Bakul Shah]

-- Bakul

> On Jul 31, 2021, at 3:16 PM, Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com> wrote:
> 
> Bakul Shah writes:
>> On Jul 31, 2021, at 12:20 PM, Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> So I never got getopt().  One of my rules is that I don't use a library
>>> in cases where the number of lines of gunk that that it takes to use a
>>> library function is >= the number of lines to just write it myself.  Yeah,
>>> I know the "but the library has more eyeballs and is debugged" argument
>>> but in reality libraries are the source of many bugs.  I've always taken
>>> the approach that I would never hire someone who had to use a library to
>>> implement a singly-linked list.
>> 
>> getopt() is perhaps the wrong solution but consider something like MH,
>> whose commands all follow a common pattern. Consider:
>> 
>>  - options (switches) all start with a single '-'
>>  - they may be abbreviated to a unique prefix.
>>  - Boolean options may be inverted by prepending -no (e.g. -nolist)
>>  - value options may also have -no format to remove a previous (or default) value
>>  - options may appear anywhere and the last instance wins
>> 
>> But different commands take different options. It would make sense to factor
>> out common parsing, help etc. for a consistent treatment. In my Go code for
>> parsing MH like options I used Go's flag package as a model.
>> 
>> Personally I vastly prefer MH style option processing to either single char
>> options or --very-long-names which can't be abbreviated. Never mind options for
>> commands like gcc, who can even remember 40+ ls options?
>> 
>> But I haven't thought about how to extend this for shell scripts, or
>> exposing these so that shells like zsh can do command completion. To specify
>> these you need a vector of tuples (name, type, default, brief-help) but that
>> is painful to do in a shell.
> 
> Ah, well, you've given away the secret of real UNIX geezers, we're on both
> this mailing list and the nmh list :-)

:-)

> Yes, I'm mostly happy with the way that nmh does options.
> 
> I guess that I would look more kindly on getopt if it had existed much earlier
> so that people writing new commands would be encouraged to use the same format.
> Not as happy with it as an afterthought.
> 
> Once again, I have to go back to the meatspace locality of reference issues.
> Sure, it would be nice to be able to factor out common parsing, for example
> if a related set of programs shared the same option set.  But unless it's
> something huge, I'd just put it in it's own file and use it for multiple
> programs; I wouldn't put it in a library.  My point is that the code that
> does the actual parsing is really trivial, and not necessarily the best
> use of a library.
> 
> As far as help goes, I don't expect help built into command line programs;
> I expect to look up error messages on the manual pages.  I'm happy with a
> generic usage error as most "helpful" output that I get from programs is
> not actually helpful.

Note that -help in MH program is far more useful as it spells out the full option name.
Consider

% refile -he
Usage: refile [msgs] [switches] +folder ...
  switches are:
  -draft
  -[no]link
  -[no]preserve
  -[no]retainsequences
  -[no]unlink
  -src +folder
  -file file
  -rmmproc program
  -normmproc
  -version
  -help
...

vs

% ls -z
ls: invalid option -- z
usage: ls [-ABCFGHILPRSTUWZabcdfghiklmnopqrstuwxy1,] [--color=when] [-D format] [file ...]