cli-guidelines VS linux

I can't think of any cli tools with great UX :( usually the important tools have lots of obtuse commands, and the small neat tools only have a couple trivial options.

But here's some guidelines as you make your own tool: https://clig.dev/

I always appreciate tools with examples and a good help text. Also the ability to pipe with stdin/stdout if possible.

The Command Line Interface Guidelines [1] says:

> Do not read secrets from environment variables

> Secrets should only be accepted via credential files, pipes, `AF_UNIX` sockets, secret management services, or another IPC mechanism

Which one of these do you use? On github it seems common for projects to use environment variables for secrets.

[1] https://clig.dev/#environment-variables

Seems they took a small step back from their previous "don't bother with man pages" stance. Now it's "Consider providing man pages."

I still find it a rather shocking order of priority, honestly.

https://clig.dev/#documentation

- E. `blah project foo --edit`

Wondering if there was any guidance on this from the UNIX people. Perhaps scoping should be done using the file system. `cd path/to/project && blah edit`. Like git does with `git --cwd=path/to/project`. Maybe a virtual FS could even be used. Then you wouldn't have to continuously type in the scope with each command. Interesting thinking about how to maintain state in the terminal...thinking about how Python's virtual env bin/activate modifies the shell.

Found an interesting guide here: https://clig.dev/

Capturing these guidelines is one of the primary reasons that https://clig.dev/ exists.

>A pidfd does not let you hold a reference to an individual thread, only to a process

I think that's outdated: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/64bef697d33b75fc06c...

For specific cases I can find ext4 explicitly checking for RO https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/8c06da67d0bd3139a97f3...

FFS predates FreeBSD and is in some capacity supported by all 3 major BSDs. I'm fairly confident that Linux actually supports it through the ufs driver ( https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/fs/ufs ); whether the use of different names in different places makes it better or worse is an exercise for the reader.

These are a bit easier to see what's going on:

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/d5cf50dafc9dd5faa1e...

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/d5cf50dafc9dd5faa1e61...

Unfortunately Github doesn't have a way to render symbols for whitespace, but you can tell by selecting the spaces that the previous version had leading tabs. Linus changed it so that the tokens `default` and the number e.g. `12` are also separated by a tab. This is tricky, because the token "default" is seven characters, it will always give this added tab a width of 1 char which makes it always layout the same as if it were a space no matter if you use tab widths of 1, 2, 4, or 8.

There was also a Gentoo effort to run atop FreeBSD[0]. The challenge of course is that afaik none of the BSD kernel ABIs are considered stable. The stable interface is the BSD libc. That said, with binfmt_misc, I don't see a reason you couldn't just run (at least some) FreeBSD binaries on Linux with a thin syscall translation layer (rather something like qemu-system) and then your layer hooked via binfmt_misc. I'm not aware of anyone who has done this for FreeBSD, but prior efforts existed as alternate binfmts for SysVr4/5 ELF binaries[2]. Either way would take some elbow grease, but you *might* even be able just reuse binfmt_elf and just have a new interpreter for FreeBSD elf.

[0] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Gentoo_FreeBSD

[1] https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/binfmt-misc.html

[2] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/fs/binfmt_elf....