On 24/02/15 09:34, Werner Koch wrote: >> I find it surprising that unrecognized tokens are simply ignored. >> Wouldn't it be preferable to error out, at least on unrecognized options? > > GnuPG does not follow the common GNU model of interchangeable options > and args. It is modeled like a classic Unix tool. Using the special > option '--' indicates that everything what follows are args and using > this is suggested to avoid args beeing interpreted as options. > > No, we can't error out on an arg which looks like an option because that > may actually be a valid argument.
Hello Werner, thank for your answer. Trying to better understand gnupg command line argument parsing I found that the real confusing thing is that arguments can be silently ignored: gpg --list-keys foo results in an error if there is no key matching "foo", however gpg --list-keys 41E999D7 foo does not result in an error and the fact that "foo" does not match any is not signaled to the user, if there is a key that matches "41E999D7". I see that in the 2.1 branch there is indeed a check and a warning for arguments that look like options (start with "--") so I must not be the only one that found this confusing :) Why do not error out if an argument cannot be used to identify a key? I think that signaling to the user that one part of the command line has not been successfully interpreted is good practice. Cheers, Daniele _______________________________________________ Gnupg-users mailing list Gnupg-users@gnupg.org http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users