Make "--no-prompt" a global switch and/or environment variable.

[jonathh21]

az *

a number of times I have been burnt with moving commands from locally executed to being run headlessly in octopus et al and finding that due to missing environment variables or missing substituted values the command is expecting/missing parameters and sits waiting for user input.

In octopus as this is a blocking event you don't get any detail that it is waiting as the stdout is not flushed - it just hangs. it isn't until you run in octopus or in another way do you realise it is missing a parameter.

"--no-prompt" helps - but not all commands support it and it gets added reactively i.e. after we have had an issue and lost time.

Describe the solution you'd like

If --no-prompt was global, and ideally set-able an an environment level we could set it one or just as a defacto extra command we use when running in pipelines.

This would enable immediate failure if parameters are missing rather than hanging.

Thanks

[yonzhan]

@jiasli for awareness

[jiasli]

due to missing environment variables or missing substituted values the command is expecting/missing parameters and sits waiting for user input

Missing argument value will usually results in instant failure, instead of hanging. For example:

$ az group delete -n
argument --name/-n/--resource-group/-g: expected one argument

Could you please give some examples of the commands you are having issue with and which argument or its value is missing?

---

As for the prompt message Are you sure you want to perform this operation? (y/n):, it is written to stdout.

Taking az group delete as an example, redirecting the output will hang because it is waiting for user input:

$ result=$(az group delete -n xxx)

The prompt functionality is provided by Knack which calls Python's built-in function input: https://github.com/microsoft/knack/blob/76e100a91454fb9779e822577571b4c1c839ee1e/knack/prompting.py#L21-L22

It appears that previously input writes to stderr, but was changed to stdout later.

• input function outputs prompt to stderr python/cpython#69878

The document also states the same:

https://docs.python.org/3/library/functions.html#input

If the prompt argument is present, it is written to standard output without a trailing newline.

But there is currently a feature request to switch back to writing to stderr:

• Change input() to always prompt to stderr python/cpython#46221

[jonathh21]

Hi thanks,

So the issue was with az development sub create
something like this:
az deployment sub create --location $location --name $appName$deploymentType$EnvironmentShortname --template-file $templateFile --parameters $parameterFile loganalyticsWorkspaceId=$loganalyticsWorkspaceId loganalyticsworkspaceKey=$loganalyticsworkspaceKey adminPassword=$adminPassword _hubSubscriptionId=$hubSubscriptionId gallerySubscriptionId=$productionHubSubscriptionId SubscriptionId=$appSubscriptionId deploymentType=$deploymentType location=$location

Except in octopus one of the parameters wasn't correctly substituting - meaning at run time it was missing.

when we put --no-prompt we got an error telling us what was missing but without it, it was holding for it to be input.

Cheers.