UpCloudLtd/upcloud-cli

CLI prints to stderr

Closed this issue · 4 comments

Davincible commented

For some reason the CLI now prints to stderr instead of to stdout, making piping more difficult.

# Empty output
upctl server list 2>/dev/null

# Prints everything
upctl server list 1>/dev/null
Version:    2.1.0                
Build date: 2022-09-07T10:46:33Z 
Built with: go1.18.5
Davincible commented

I now see this is listed in the release notes

Breaking: Human output, including errors, is written to stderr instead of stdout.

... why?

kangasta commented

Hi, sorry for the confusion!

The idea was that human output is not ideal for passing to a another command for processing, but of course there are some other use cases as well, such as piping the output to grep. We are currently refactoring the output logic and could further tune how the output streams are used for human output.

What is your use-case for piping? I'm thinking if there is something we could add on the upctl side to remove the need for piping.

Davincible commented

I pipe to e.g. check if servers are up and running, as a step in a bigger script.
Fixed it now with -ojson | jq.

I would say that human and machine output can both go to stdin since you only have one at a time. If you specify machine output you won't have human output anyways.

kangasta commented

This will soon be fixed in v2.2.0

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