In an attempt to solidify my growing reputation as the Andy Rooney of the Microsoft world, I have to take a few moments here and raise a simple question about command-line tools: What does Microsoft have against feedback?
Server 2008 continues Server 2003’s trend of giving sysadmins more and more command line utilities, and command-line versions of graphical tools. That’s great, because lots of times we need to write scripts. It’s also great because sometimes the command line is just quicker, especially if you happen to be there already. But I’m getting awfully tired of command-line tools that don’t give you any feedback as to whether the operation succeeded or failed. The classic example on Server Core is OCSETUP. I don’t know how many times I’ve gone through the drill of installing or removing some service on Server Core with OCSETUP, only to have to verify it afterwards with OCLIST. (And you’d better verify it, because OCSETUP role designations are case-sensitive, for some reason that isn’t good enough, no matter what it is.)
Would it kill Microsoft to include some sort of notification re: success or failure, especially with commands that go off and do something really important? I know they can do it, because they’ve written tools like DISKPART, which is reasonably communicative. Personally I think it should be deemed a venial sin every time Microsoft – or anyone, for that matter – puts out a command line tool that succeeds or fails silently. Such tools are the sullen teenagers of the IT world. End of Rooney-like rant. (cue stopwatch ticking)
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