cd and rm don't make network requests. There's plenty of precedent for outputting by default. zip, wget, rsync, apt-get, brew.
You can always use --quiet if you pipe our command and have it not output. Am I missing something about your use-case? We have a practical problem right now in that we get a lot of bad bug reports where we need to tell users to re-run with --verbose. Almost every day in IRC, someone gets told to re-run with --verbose. On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 4:23 PM, Brian LeRoux <b...@brian.io> wrote: > Well, those aren't UNIX tools. Those are userland tools. (So are we, I > know.) > > Imagine if `cd` output something every time you moved. Or rm was always > noisy. Super annoying. Anyhow, the book Classic Shell Scripting explains > this better than I. Recommended reading. > > I'd rather our tools followed UNIX philosophy here and where quiet by > defaul and noisy if asked. For the record, I've talked to Issac about just > this issue in node b/c it makes composing scripts more difficult when you > have to pipe garbage output around and a tacit plan for npm was to make it > quiet by default someday when it gets stable. (Who knows if that is still > the case.) > > > On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 1:01 PM, Andrew Grieve <agri...@chromium.org> > wrote: > > > I don't think that's really true for other similar tools. > > E.g. "npm install" reports progress by default > > E.g. "git clone" shows progress by default. > > > > > > On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 3:51 PM, Brian LeRoux <b...@brian.io> wrote: > > > > > The convention for UNIX tools is to be quiet by default and fail > > noisily. A > > > well writ script should exit quietly so you can chain commands. (Or > pipe, > > > etc.) > > > > > > I'd prefer we added a --verbose flag. > > > > > > > > > On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 12:35 PM, Braden Shepherdson < > bra...@chromium.org > > > >wrote: > > > > > > > I'd rather we call it -q and --quiet though; that's a pretty common > > > > convention for Unix tools. > > > > > > > > > > > > On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 3:35 PM, Braden Shepherdson < > > bra...@chromium.org > > > > >wrote: > > > > > > > > > +1 > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 3:31 PM, Andrew Grieve < > agri...@chromium.org > > > > >wrote: > > > > > > > > > >> I think this was discussed before but I can't find the thread. > > > > >> > > > > >> Is anyone not in favour of making the tools verbose by default and > > > > having > > > > >> a > > > > >> --silent flag instead? > > > > >> > > > > >> Makes it much easier to get good debug reports and lets users know > > > when > > > > >> slow things are taking place. > > > > >> > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > >
