Cli: Allow global flags after command

Created on 24 May 2016 · 21Comments · Source: urfave/cli

This is just a suggestion, but to me it seems logical to allow global flags after the command as well, not only before it.

For example, if you have a verbose flag, -v:
myapp -v server
vs.
myapp server -v

To me the second one does visually make more sense. Are there cases when this is a bad idea (and therefore the reason to why this is not how it is currently implemented)?

arev2 help wanted kinfeature pinned statuconfirmed

Source

fgblomqvist

👍28

All 21 comments

Hi @fgblomqvist, I agree with you completely. Unfortunately this is baggage that we carry from using the Go stdlib flag library (which stops parsing the moment it hits a non-flag) so we cannot support it unless we were to rip that out and do our own flag parsing (which we have discussed a bit, but is a non-trivial effort). You can see some more conversation about this in #355.

I'll leave this open as a future enhancement though!

jszwedko on 24 May 2016

Okay, I see.

fgblomqvist on 25 May 2016

The core flag package is BSD licensed, so perhaps the easiest fix would be to include a fork of said package, modified to support intermixed arguments/flags. This has the benefit of keeping the API identical, making the integration simpler than a rewrite or using a different 3rd-party package. Does this sound reasonable?

noffle on 14 Sep 2016

@noffle mmm, that is not a bad idea given the tradeoffs. I'll try to give that a shot in the near future.

Thank you for the suggestion!

jszwedko on 14 Sep 2016

Also interested in this.

0xdeafcafe on 13 Feb 2017

Bump up for this one too !
But in the meantime, @jszwedko : Thank you so far for the good job you've done ;)

nikkolasg on 30 Sep 2017

wondering if this issue is still up for a fix :)

marwan-at-work on 14 Jun 2018

Given that this is from last year, I think I'm comfortable closing it 🙂 feel free to re-open / open a new issue / comment in support if there's still interest here!

lynncyrin on 17 Aug 2019

Oh!!! I just noticed there's 22 👍s. Re-opening now 📈

lynncyrin on 17 Aug 2019

👍1

This may have been fixed by v2? I'd appreciate if someone could investigate that 🙏

🔗 => https://github.com/urfave/cli/releases/tag/v2.0.0

lynncyrin on 27 Nov 2019

I loved cli library before but this issue of not able to __inter-mix__ arguments and flags is a bit problematic.

To make things worse, certain earlier version used a reordering hack (see above "hack to sidestep urfave/cli#427" which I kind of liked) but this change was later reverted, causing the behavior to vary greatly between versions. I understand that there are bugs regarding this both ways, but the Unix-y default should always be allowing mixing.

I had to track down bugs where cli are suddenly not able to extract flag values where earlier versions worked. Switching to cobra for now.

tanghaibao on 12 Dec 2019

I don't think that this was fixed in v2, I also don't think that "local" flags are supported after the first non-flag

Nokel81 on 5 Mar 2020

I don't think that this was fixed in v2

Then this issue is available for anyone to work on 👍

lynncyrin on 6 Mar 2020

This issue or PR has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. Please add a comment bumping this if you're still interested in it's resolution! Thanks for your help, please let us know if you need anything else.