running an unknown subcommand does not fail

[seflless]

This may be by design, but I would have expected calling:

command <unknown-sub-command> 

...to fail. But instead it just exits immediately, this can lead to confusion when tired as you might think your command isn't working, but instead it's just spelt incorrectly.

Is there a flag or something to enable this error. Or should I just make a white list of known commands and fail when the first parameter isn't a known sub command?

[CodeMan99]

You should fail in your parent command explicitly. Remember that some programs may do processing in the parent command while still having subcommands.

[seflless]

Yeah, this is what I ended up doing. Added some git style:

Unknown command. Did you you mean:
  push
  clone
  ...

[CodeMan99]

It would be nice to have it fail if your "program chain" contains only .command and no .option. Or have the ability to turn on failing when there isn't a matching subcommand.

That said, this is definitely a feature request. Perhaps we could work together to create a pull request?

[gangstead]

Here's a couple of lines of code to add to your top level command to fail for unknown subcommands:

const _ = require('lodash');


const subCmd = _.head(program.args);
const cmds = _.map(program.commands, '_name');

if (!_.includes(cmds, subCmd)) {
  program.help();
}

[seflless]

@gangstead Yeah, I ended up doing something like what git does. Where it detects if there isn't a match and then does a fuzzy match and asks you if you meant to type: <list of subcommands with a close hamming distance)

[gangstead]

That's much nicer than my quick and lazy solution. Is that code anywhere I can check it out?

[seflless]

It's for our internal cli. Here's a gist though with the relevant parts isolated:
https://gist.github.com/francoislaberge/80ca6cbc33232c438680