A few things I have learnt from my new job of looking at lots of other peoples command line tools.
1. Keep the number of required parameters as low as possible. 2. Have as many options as you want but make sure there is a good default. The defaults should be what an beginning user will want. Tne expert user will know how to set the options he/she needs. 3. Have a good man or equivellent eash to find documentation for each options 4. Give working examples critically with sets of inputs that work! 5. Start the documentation of with the default case an build up. Don't get over excited with showing the user all the cool things you can do before you actaully showing what the command line tool actuall does. May sound very basic but I have seen cases where many of these things are broken. If someone can not get your thing running in a way he/she understand within an hour max 2 they are Gone! Christian# ________________________________________ From: Menaka Madushanka [[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, May 28, 2015 7:35 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Defining Command line options for Taverna language command line tool Hi everyone, For the implementation of the taverna command line tool, the most important thing is to define the options that could be used. I suppose the options should be like this. * They must be simple and easy to understand * Should be not too long I'll be very grateful if someone could give me some suggestions for the command line options. And I'm currently investigating a proper command line parser library for the project. Thank you Regards Menaka -- Menaka Madushanka Jayawardena Faculty of Engineering, <http://www.pdn.ac.lk/eng> University of Peradeniyaya. LinkedIn <http://lk.linkedin.com/in/menakajayawardena>
