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Comment by rk06 | Hacker News Reader

a new user should not expected to know whether to use "--info", "--help", or "-info" or "/info"

A power user can just pass the right params. Besides, it is not that hard to support "--yolo" parameter for that use case

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Would you enjoy writing `rm --yolo file` instead of `rm file` every time?

Not taking a position but the design of rm strengthens the position that recursive by default without flags isn’t ok. rm makes you confirm when you want changes to recurse dirs.

In this case, "file" is the arg, not --yolo. `rm` without any args returns `` rm: missing operand Try 'rm --help' for more information. ```

`oxfmt` should have done the same and `oxfmt .`, with the desired dir ".", should have been the required usage.

I expect invoking a command-line tool without any arguments to perform the most common action. Displaying the help should only be a fallback if there is no most common action. For example, `git init` modifies the current directory instead of asking you, because that’s what you want to do most of the time.

No, but we're not talking about `oxfmt file` here, but `oxfmt` with no argument.

I don't expect `rm` with no argument to trash everything in my CWD. Which it doesn't, see sibling's comment.

would you enjoy it if running "rm" in any folder recursively deleted all files in it?

I know feels aren't the objective truth but I feel like most people would default to running "new-cli-tool --help" first thing as a learned (defensive) habit. After all quite a bit of stuff that runs in a terminal emulator does something when ran without arguments or flags.

I feel most people should refer to manual before running arbitary command. but that's because "crontab -r" has taught me this the hard way.

new devs should not learn these things the hard way

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