The source content for blog.juliobiason.me
You can not select more than 25 topics Topics must start with a letter or number, can include dashes ('-') and can be up to 35 characters long.

33 lines
1.5 KiB

+++
title = "Things I Learnt The Hard Way - Command Line Options Are Weird, But Helpful"
date = 2019-07-15
[taxonomies]
tags = ["en-au", "books", "things i learnt", "configuration", "command line options", "cli"]
+++
In this day and age, when everything has a graphical interface, does it still
makes sense to add command line options to your application? In fact, it does.
<!-- more -->
When I mentioned the configuration file, you may have thought about using
adding a default path for it and using the same file over and over.
Well, that's not wrong, but what if you want to use a different configuration?
Would you keep moving the original configuration file to another place, moving
your configuration back and keep this back and forth? Keep both versions and
just use a [symbolic link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_link) with
the configuration filename pointing to the one you want?
Why not add a command line option in which the user can select which
configuration file should be loaded?
This would make their life _and yours_ easy.
Also, be aware that, today, there may be libraries to handle command line in
every language, which will help you build a good command line interface, along
with standardizing it to have the same interface as other applications.
{{ chapters(prev_chapter_link="/books/things-i-learnt/resist-easy", prev_chapter_title="Resist The Temptation Of Easy", next_chapter_link="/books/things-i-learnt/start-stupid", next_chapter_title="Start Stupid") }}