Re:Show HN: Ultimate Plumber – a tool for writing Linux pipe...
by ken on Thursday October 25, 2018 @02:03AM
(#18298813)
Yep, that's basically the solution that I came up with, too. I have a "dry-run?" flag planned, if I ever end up with enough writeback operations where it'd be useful.
(That's the common Unix shell name for it, though it's not entirely consistent -- which is another problem with using Unix built-ins!)
One thing I've noticed is that it's really frustrating (and not at all helpful) to require perfect validity from a shell-like tool. There's just too many times where you want to edit something into something else, without needing to find a perfect path of valid and meaningful syntax at every intermediate step. So if you have a flag on an operation that doesn't understand that flag, the flag will have a (?) badge to indicate that it won't be understood or used, but the pipeline will still run.
WhatIf instructs the command not to make any changes, but merely to log what it would do. You can "Remove-Item C:\Windows -Force -WhatIf" and it will output "What if: Performing the operation "Remove Directory" on target "C:\windows"" but not delete anything.
(implementing support for "whatif" is optional, so you can't casually use it on any given cmdlet without first checking that cmdlet supports it and makes sensible use of the parameter instead of ignoring it, but the idea is there).