Options shared by a root command and its subCommands

[electrotype]

I had an issue that took me a long time to figure out and fix. It is about an option that I add to all the commands of my application: -s for "silent". When this option is set, a command will disable all outputs when running.

Since this is a global option that I add to all commands, I created a addGlobalOptions(command) function and I call it for every command.

The issue is that I was also calling addGlobalOptions() on the root Command!

My program looks a bit like:

const commander = new Command();
addGlobalOptions(commander);
addSubCommands(commander);

In addSubCommands, each command has the global options added too, using addGlobalOptions.

By calling addGlobalOptions on the root "commander" Command, a subCommand would always receive undefined for the -s argument, even when specified by the user! By removing the global options on the root "commander" Command, true is received correctly.

I did not find anything in the documentation about this? What is the expected behavior when an option is shared between a root Command and one of its subCommand? Or maybe I'm doing something wrong?

[shadowspawn]

The root command parses its options from anywhere on the command line, so it consumes the option first before the subcommand. The relevant line in the README is:

Options on the command line are not positional, and can be specified before or after other arguments.

You can add and access a common option on the root command, or add it to all your subcommands. A visible difference to the user is where in the help the option appears. Do you think of it as a "program" option on the root command, or a common option which every subcommand has locally?

There is an open issue with collected reports and research: #1229
and the related issues to your problem are: #598 #1033 #1307

[electrotype]

Thank you for the explanation.

[shadowspawn]

Pull Request opened to add .enablePositionalOptions() and .passThroughOptions(): #1427

[shadowspawn]

Opened poll on possible enhancements to global options: #1551

[shadowspawn]

Opened a draft PR for .addCommonOption() #1670