“It’s rare that printing nothing at all is the best default behavior.”

Aanand Prasad, Ben Firshman, Carl Tashian, and Eva Parish put together Command Line Interface Guidelines for people who write command-line tools. I like that it harkens and links back to other writing, and is also pragmatic: shares good parameter-parsing libraries, commonly used options, and so on. Here are some good principles that caught my attention: Display output on success, but keep it brief. Traditionally, when nothing is wrong, UNIX commands display no output to the user. This makes sense when they’