Validation of nil args

[rdgoite]

I'm not really sure if this is an issue, but I noticed that when calling ValidateArgs and the args are set to nil, the handler just effectively ignores it and returns nil and practically pass validation. Is this the right behaviour? The function ArbitraryArgs seems to suggest it ought to be doing something else, although I'm also a bit confused about it returning arbitrary args.

https://github.com/spf13/cobra/blob/2e8ba6f3087bda425da42af31f7373cd2c2c08c5/command.go#L1016

[marckhouzam]

Hi @rdgoite. I hope I understood your question properly.

Notice that the check for nil is made against c.Args which are not the actual arguments but the function the program can define to specify what kind of arguments the command accepts:

https://github.com/spf13/cobra/blob/2e8ba6f3087bda425da42af31f7373cd2c2c08c5/command.go#L74-L75

So if the program has not specified any function in the Args field, then ArbitraryArgs will be accepted.

[rdgoite]

Thanks @marckhouzam. So to clarify, Args is a PositionalArgs which is a function for validating arguments. If that's not set, it means then there's no need to check the actual command-line args. Is that correct?

[rdgoite]

Just to add a bit more context into this, I encountered this issue while trying to test my code:

cmd := CreateCmd()
cmd.SetArgs(nil)
//set stdout, stderr, etc
cmd.Execute()

I have set the command to check if there's at least one argument:

if len(args) < 1 {
    return errors.New("expected 1 argument")
}

However, when I run the test, I'm not getting the expected error. Instead the command proceeds doing what it's meant to do, because for some reason the args is not empty or nil. The args contains one element that looks like a regex containing the name of the test I'm running (e.g. ^\QTestDoStuff\E$).

It looks like it's somehow being set here:

https://github.com/spf13/cobra/blob/2e8ba6f3087bda425da42af31f7373cd2c2c08c5/command.go#L954

The cobra.test filepath base, where does that come from? I assume that's the mechanism to allow tests to run without issues, but for some reason that condition passes for my test.

[marckhouzam]

Thanks @marckhouzam. So to clarify, Args is a PositionalArgs which is a function for validating arguments. If that's not set, it means then there's no need to check the actual command-line args. Is that correct?

That's right

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