News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Exploring CLI Best Practices by Annatar on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @12:34PM (#12694330)
My argument is that many people come to a cli utility expecting that <foo /path/to/myfile> simply works.

So are for or against that? If you're for the < /path/to/my/file argument, then we are in complete agreement. A command line application should read from stdin where that applies.

Re:Exploring CLI Best Practices by dllthomas on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @01:38PM (#12694950)
It seems to me there was confusion here caused by an unfortunate choice of angle brackets for quoting.

I think `foo /path/to/myfile` is what the parent was trying to say.

Re:Exploring CLI Best Practices by jpitz on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @02:10PM (#12695212)
It was. Thank you.

I want stdin to work. I also want specifying a file name to work. I think supporting both is good UI design, and follows the principle of least surprise.