Once you set the guidelines, people usually want to innovate:
- maybe a machine-readable file descriptor is good. Stdout lines remain for the (potentially dwindling) awk and sed users, structured lines in something slightly wider than JSON to fd3. Based on this link, Markdown and HTML wouldn’t deserve their own file descriptor, but flags to spice up stdout.
- SBOM facility matters. If everything is a single-file executable, maybe —-version should spill SBOM to fd3.
- pipes are great for secrets, but don’t forget that a password manager will block for input. This is all headed toward non-interactivity, so prepare to use a secrets file.
- maybe man should be rewritten for a world where search terms can be very intelligently combined. `man git bisect` doesn’t need to hook into the innards of however git is packaged to infer what the user wants. I wish `man` would just wrangle system-specific cheat sheets; experienced people need to know what’s dangerous or unsupported on boutique systems.
- Compartmentalization means I sometimes need to a check if $HOME is not $HOME between the shell and a utility. Every OS has some devolution like this. There’s room to innovate making that more reliable.
- maybe a machine-readable file descriptor is good. Stdout lines remain for the (potentially dwindling) awk and sed users, structured lines in something slightly wider than JSON to fd3. Based on this link, Markdown and HTML wouldn’t deserve their own file descriptor, but flags to spice up stdout.
- SBOM facility matters. If everything is a single-file executable, maybe —-version should spill SBOM to fd3.
- pipes are great for secrets, but don’t forget that a password manager will block for input. This is all headed toward non-interactivity, so prepare to use a secrets file.
- maybe man should be rewritten for a world where search terms can be very intelligently combined. `man git bisect` doesn’t need to hook into the innards of however git is packaged to infer what the user wants. I wish `man` would just wrangle system-specific cheat sheets; experienced people need to know what’s dangerous or unsupported on boutique systems.
- Compartmentalization means I sometimes need to a check if $HOME is not $HOME between the shell and a utility. Every OS has some devolution like this. There’s room to innovate making that more reliable.