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A comment on Ask HN: What are the best and worst command-line interfaces you have used?.

Re:Ask HN: What are the best and worst command-line interfac... by rwmj on Wednesday November 24, 2021 @08:20AM (#29329705)
My niggle is with commands that cannot be composed, ie. consumed by other tools or shell scripts or built into pipelines. There are lots of small things that break composition: Not exiting with a non-zero code on error, sending error messages to stdout, not producing output that can be easily parsed by another command. Too many commands suffer from one of these problems, unfortunately.
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Re:Ask HN: What are the best and worst command-line interfac... by frou_dh on Wednesday November 24, 2021 @05:08PM (#29335748)
One that's unfortunately quite common is unconditionally outputting ANSI colour escape sequences even when the output isn't the terminal.
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Re:Ask HN: What are the best and worst command-line interfac... by qsort on Wednesday November 24, 2021 @09:19AM (#29330176)
Honestly that's the drawback of unix-ish interfaces. Don't get me wrong, text first is usually a sane default, but there is also value in an interface like Powershell, where you would write your program as a Cmdlet that returns an object-like response.
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