enhancement: -q should quietly fail

[alanbork]

I like to use the -q argument as an optional argument to scripts like this:

function killpick { ps ax | pick -q $1 | awk '{print $1}' | xargs kill -9; }

this way I can either pass the name of what I want to kill (and confirm it matched a running program before killing) or run it with no arguments and type in the name interactively. But -q causes pick to error out if there's no actual argument passed, making this kind of thing unnecessarily hard.

[mptre]

On Sun, Mar 13, 2022 at 06:58:14PM -0700, alanbork wrote:

I like to use the -q argument as an optional argument to scripts like this:

function killpick { ps ax | pick -q $1 | awk '{print $1}' | xargs kill -9; }

this way I can either pass the name of what I want to kill (and confirm it matched a running program before killing) or run it with no arguments and type in the name interactively. But -q causes pick to error out if there's no actual argument passed, making this kind of thing unnecessarily hard.

Options accepting an argument that's silently ignored if absent is a construct I have never encountered before. I think you approaching this from the wrong angle, this is what you want?

function killpick { ps ax | pick ${1:+-q $1} | awk  '{print $1}' | xargs kill -9; }

[alanbork]

Yes, that solves it at the "cost" of a significantly more complicated usage pattern for the end user.

perhaps a solution that would appease both of us: pick takes no arguments other than options. Perhaps the un-named optional argument could be the query.

eg

... | pick -q hello ... | pick hello

would produce the same effect.

On Mon, Mar 14, 2022, 12:06 AM Anton Lindqvist @.***> wrote:

On Sun, Mar 13, 2022 at 06:58:14PM -0700, alanbork wrote:

I like to use the -q argument as an optional argument to scripts like this:

function killpick { ps ax | pick -q $1 | awk '{print $1}' | xargs kill -9; }

this way I can either pass the name of what I want to kill (and confirm it matched a running program before killing) or run it with no arguments and type in the name interactively. But -q causes pick to error out if there's no actual argument passed, making this kind of thing unnecessarily hard.

Options accepting an argument that's silently ignored if absent is a construct I have never encountered before. I think you approaching this from the wrong angle, this is what you want?

function killpick { ps ax | pick ${1:+-q $1} | awk '{print $1}' | xargs kill -9; }

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[mptre]

On Mon, Mar 14, 2022 at 09:07:39AM -0700, alanbork wrote:

Yes, that solves it at the "cost" of a significantly more complicated usage pattern for the end user.

perhaps a solution that would appease both of us: pick takes no arguments other than options. Perhaps the un-named optional argument could be the query.

eg

... | pick -q hello ... | pick hello

would produce the same effect.

Sorry, no interest in such behavior.