That's dangerous if people don't read the info message closely and assume that the extension has finished successfully, but would then lose their real WS content because it wasn't extended. So I think this should not automatically create a workspace but just error out.
From one of our users came the following comprehensible request:
When extending the lifetime of a non-existing WS it simply creates that workspace instead of giving an error message:
$ ws_extend my-nonexisting-project 10 Info: creating workspace. /scratch/ws/username-my-nonexisting-project remaining extensions : 2 remaining time in days: 10 $ echo $? 0
That's dangerous if people don't read the info message closely and assume that the extension has finished successfully, but would then lose their real WS content because it wasn't extended. So I think this should not automatically create a workspace but just error out.