In Praise of –dry-run

For the last few months, I have been developing a new reporting application. Early on, I decided to add a –dry-run option to the run command. This turned out to be quite useful – I have used it many times a day while developing and testing the application. Background The application will generate a set of reports every weekday. It has a loop that checks periodically if it is time to generate new reports. If so, it will read data from a database, apply some logic to create the reports, zip the reports, upload them to an sftp server, check for error responses on the sftp server, parse the error responses, and send out notification mails. The files (the generated reports, and the downloaded feedback files) are moved to different directories depending on the step in the process. A simple and straightforward application. Early in the development process, when testing the incomplete application, I remembered that Subversion (the version control system after CVS, before Git) had a –dry-run…