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Comment by vladvasiliu

12 hours ago

While I can get behind things such as "use version control," "use backups", etc. this is definitely not what I'd expect from a program run without arguments, especially when it will go and change stuff.

What? The very first page of documentation tells you this. The help screen clearly shows a `--check` argument. This is a formatter and uses the same arguments as many others - in particular Prettier, the most popular formatter in the ecosystem.

How were you not expecting this? Did you not bother to read anything before installing and running this command on a sensitive codebase?

  • I do usually run new tools from somewhere harmless, like ~/tmp, just in case they do something unexpected.

    But most formatters I'm used to absolutely don't do this. For example, `rustfmt` will read input from stdin if no argument is given. It can traverse modules in a project, but it won't start modifying everything under your CWD.

    Most unix tools will either wait for some stdin or dump some kind of help when no argument is given. Hell, according to this tool's docs, even `prettier` seems to expect an argument:

        > Running oxfmt without arguments formats the current directory (*equivalent to prettier --write .*)
    

    I'm not familiar with prettier, so I may be wrong, but from the above, I understand that prettier doesn't start rewriting files if no argument is given?

    Looking up prettier's docs, they have this to say:

        > --write
        This rewrites all processed files in place. *This is comparable to the eslint --fix* workflow.
    

    So eslint also doesn't automatically overwrite everything?

    So yeah, I can't say this is expected behaviour, even if it's documented.