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Comments on For scripting what are the pros and cons of command line arguments versus capturing input at the start?

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For scripting what are the pros and cons of command line arguments versus capturing input at the start?

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Let's say I have a script that needs the user to set X number of variables at the start. One can either

  • Pass the arguments in on the command line.
  • Start the program and then have the user input the variables with Python's input() function or PHP's fopen("php://stdin", "r") for example.

What would the pros and cons be and when would I decide to use one method versus the other?

software-practices command-line-interface
posted over 3 years ago
10mo ago by Wicket‭
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Charlie Brumbaugh‭
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General comments (1 comment)
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Pros of CLI arguments/flags include:

  • Easier to leverage the tool in another script or via other automation so that user interaction is not required

  • If certain arguments are optional and/or have default values, the user is not burdened with these choices when they are unimportant

  • Once someone has used the tool a few times, it is often faster for them to memorize their preferred parameters or save/alias them than to have to manually input them each time

Cons may include:

  • If the targeted users are not comfortable using a CLI, they may struggle to use the application. Receiving parameters via interactive input may be more user-friendly (especially if interactive error handling/validation is employed to give the user immediate feedback and assistance with invalid options)

  • If the parameters are complex and certain options have conditional relationships upon others, gathering this information at runtime may be more user-friendly

Other considerations:

  • Consider accepting either CLI parameters or gathering parameters at runtime if no arguments are provided

  • Consider a configuration file if options will rarely change or are private, such as passwords/keys

  • If the script operates on a file, also consider receiving input via stdin along with various parameters, which enables data to be piped to the application from multiple sources (i.e., not just from a file, or from a file after being filtered through another tool)

posted over 3 years ago
3y ago
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qohelet‭
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General comments (5 comments)
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Someone‭ wrote over 3 years ago
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One point that seems to be missing: Command line parameters have a platformdependent limit on their length. You can nearly read unlimited input. This becomes very important when you need to handle many files and cannot rely on xarg or need to work in one run.

dustytrash‭ wrote over 3 years ago
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The user doesn't need to worry about escaping quotes, and using quotes for arguments containing spaces with capturing input

klutt‭ wrote over 3 years ago
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"If certain arguments are optional" - This is fairly easy to solve in both approaches. I don't think it counts as a difference between these two concepts.

qohelet‭ wrote over 3 years ago
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@klutt true, depending on style of collecting params via stdin, usually clicking "Enter" is sufficient to accept default values. However, they could be ignored altogether in CLI params and just sensible defaults used (but I see your point that this could also be the case at runtime also if an alternative method of gathering params via stdin were used). The question is rather vague (no specific program info/objectives), so my answer is necessarily also so.

jrh‭ wrote over 3 years ago · edited over 3 years ago
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"If the targeted users are not comfortable using a CLI" -- another thing to keep in mind that affects both methods, there's a good bit of ambiguity in the exact format needed for the arguments when they are typed in manually instead of, e.g., provided through a UI. E.g., does the program accept "parameter" or parameter? parameter=value? --parameter value? --parameter=value? --parameter="value"? I've seen a ton of variations on that, you have to document this sort of thing carefully.