What should the tool do?

Depends entirely on the tool. Common behavior is to read from STDIN, to perform a default action or to show a help message. Either is fine.

What do you expect?

If it doesn't seem to to do anything, I expect it to terminate when I send EOF (Ctrl+D)

What would annoy you?

If it erased my data

What would you prefer?

That it not erased my data.

Update: There are tools like screen that confuse the hell out of you if you have no idea what it does, and you start it. Tools like that should show some kind of informational message unless started with an option or arguments (and unless a config file is present). Apart from that it's silly (and possibly dangerous) to start a program of which you have no clue. As a former part-time sys admin I stopped doing that :-)

Perl 6 - links to (nearly) everything that is Perl 6.

In reply to Re: CLI Default Action by moritz
in thread CLI Default Action by Xiong

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