Question

I’m writing some unix-style Ruby scripts that take option flags. Normally, I write a lot of STDOUT.puts and STDERR.puts statments in these scripts. Now I’m wondering whether it’s “good form” to put in --verbose or -q flags for switching on or off helpful output to STDERR.

Two arguments against doing that are that

1. it would make the program more complex,
2. users can already silence the logging output by redirecting STDERR to /dev/null

But then again, one of the tenets of the Unix Philosophy is that silence is golden, which implies that there should always be a –verbose mode flag. But doesn’t this stand in tension with the tenet of making small programs that do one thing well?

And a second question would be: if silent/verbose flags are a good idea, should verbosity ever be the default?

Can some UNIX programming gurus please advise.

Answer 1

Tools that I have to redirect STDERR to get them to shut up are tools I don’t use. It’s not that more complicated to support quiet operation.