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Comment by tikhonj | Hacker News Reader

I think having to use an option like '--force' is considered warning enough. Which is, I think, perfectly reasonable. Of course, I don't know your exact scenario, but that's how things seem to work.

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Yeah, well the thing is I never had to use it before. But a package required it, so with a quick google-fu it said to include --force. What wasn't clear is that you had to do a --force for only that package.. while I simply added it to my already crafted command. (I.e. ctrl-p --force <enter>). Let's say I've learned that one the hard way ;)

This is why I'll never jump on the "GUIs are for stupid people" bandwagon.

This issue is completely orthogonal to whether or not a GUI was in use. The text UI could just have easily asked for confirmation, and a graphical UI could easily allow the user to shoot themselves in the foot.

Even though I agree with your statement, do you truly believe that if a GUI had presented the options Yes/No/Cancel/Force or whatever, that less people would have suffered from issues like this? I probably would have used that --force flag on a non production system and a GUI would even make that decision more easy for me...

This has nothing to do with a GUI vs. command-line interface. You're confusing the decision of what information to present with how to present it.

Well, the thing is that it complained about only one particular file which I didn't care and knew it was safe to --force on it. So, basically, you type:

  foo -abc

And it tells you, "Can't alter file bar.conf".

After a google search you read, "bar.conf needs the --force switch to be altered".

So you're like, fine..

  foo -abc --force

* Everything crash *

Next reboot,

"Press <enter> to get in the shell"

Me pressing enter.. and even the keyboard isn't working.

That's what happened.

You should be using Pacmatic. The --force thing was a news feed item, and Pacmatic would have shown you the official news before you could have done damage.

I didn't know about this (on and off, but current and likely more consistent in the future arch user). From me, and anyone in my position, thank you.

Thanks, that's interesting!

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