> I think what’s happening is the author tried a web URI that had an ampersand in, Bash then background the process and the author panicked thinking the Go runtime was parsing the ampersand rather than his or her $SHELL.

Yes, this is exactly what happened.

The author says this is one of their first Go projects, which explains their misunderstanding. They still have a lot to learn, not only about Go but Bash as well.

That being said, I am happy to see new programmers learn new things, especially in one of my favourite programming languages.

I remember a couple of years ago, one project also took file paths as a parameter and supported multiple parameters. In the readme the author stated that they hadn't yet written support for wildcards (globing) so each file needed to be included manually. There were surprised and pleased when I raised an "issue" pointing out that actually they get globing for free with their $SHELL.

That experience really made me appreciate just how varied developers experiences were with the command line and also appreciative that people are still writing tools and happy to share them with the community even when they're not 40+ year old UNIX grey beards. It's good to see fresh folk adopt TUIs.

And we as a community in software should appreciate and celebrate when friendly and helpful support is provided to newcomers. Thank you!

yes.

No, I think the author doesn't understand how to urlencode parameters as the image URL is passed to the API like so:

curl -s https://trace.moe/api/search?url=https://foobar/baz.jpg

And in the project the URL is simply appended:

https://github.com/irevenko/what-anime-cli/blob/main/cli/lin...

The API provides both GET and POST methods of passing the image file or URL and the author has somehow mangled them both into one as well :)

https://soruly.github.io/trace.moe/#/

Good catch and that's definitely true as well but there's no way the author could have passed an ampersand into a Go string (ie as a parameter in said tool) without understanding the need to escape it in the first place. The shell would have parsed the ampersand as a reserved token out before the URI encoding bug was exposed.

As first project though, it's a great learning exercise for the author. We all have to start somewhere.

So in other words, OP's gut "Makes me a bit uncomfortable" is an understatement.