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I'm glad he mentioned the "Silence trumps noise" point. I like to call the idiom "no news is good news". Tell me only when I need to know something (like a fail
by supersillyus 15y ago
I'm glad he mentioned the "Silence trumps noise" point.
I like to call the idiom "no news is good news".
Tell me only when I need to know something (like a failure); "-v" is always there if I need it.
It feels uncomfortable to get no output at first, but once you get used to it there's much less to read.
It's rather like the Plan 9 convention of programs returning strings instead of ints when then terminate; an empty string means success, a non-empty string contains the error message. I wish other OSes had adopted that.
- njharman 15y agoProblem with "silence" and "no news" is they are indistinguishable from many failure modes. I vastly prefer confirmation of action(s) as default and -q flag. At very lest there needs to be -v flag that provides confirmation of action(s)
- joeyh 15y agoConfigure your shell to report nonzero exit statuses. joey@gnu:~>true joey@gnu:~>false zsh: exit 1 In zsh this is done by "setopt print_exit_value". It's a pity shells don't do it by default.
- njharman 15y agoGood hint, but it's value is very niche. Waiting until exit for status is fail. Many commands take seconds if not minutes/hours to complete. I wanna see some indication that they are working and not hung/etc.
- BrandonM 15y agoThere is no silence vs noise problem. Send output to STDOUT and "noise" to STDERR. Use -q and -v when appropriate. I thought it was weird that the author created a false dichotomy between being informational and giving only output that can be easily processed.