On: In the Beginning was the Command Line (1999)

[Jtsummers]

Many CLI tools have a dry run option for expensive (time/resource wise) or risky commands (one way, irreversible or reversible only with a lot of effort). It would be interesting to see this become the default for some of them, with a separate flag `--now-i-mean-it` to actually execute.

[sumtechguy → Jtsummers]

I wish more tools had the option of dry run. Been using it with ansible quite bit in the past few weeks. Look ma I can mess up 50 computers all at once!

[vram22 → Jtsummers]

Yes, like

make -n

https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/make.1.html

In fact, the above man page shows that one long form of the -n option is named --dry-run :)

[prepend → Jtsummers]

I’ve spent so much time with rsync’s -n (I think it supports —-dry-run as well).

[stainforth → prepend]

Shouldn't dry run be the default and the "prod" run be requiring adding the switch