[Docs] Requesting info on repeated flags

[Bjohnson131]

Hello!
In some programs such as SSH I can repeat the -v flag in their CLI to invoke different behaviors. For example -v will print info level logs, while -v -v, or -vv will print debug level logs, and -vvv, -v -v -v will be more verbose and so on.

I'd like to know if this is possible, and how to do it programmatically.

If the info is provided in this issue, I'd be happy to put it into a PR for the user guide to complete this request.

[marckhouzam]

Cobra, through spf13/pflag supports repeating flags but not in the way you describe above (at least I’m not aware of anything like that).

Repeating flags will be something like adduser -u user1 -u user2 -u user3. The type of flag that repeat are the ones named *Array and *Slice in the pflag api.

To achieve something like -vv and -vvv in cobra you will need to use different long flags for each incantation: --vv and --vvv (notice the double - used for long flags).

If we compare to your example, from a programming point of view it’s the same in my mind, the difference is in the user experience with:

• the double -
• the fact that you can not split --vv into -v -v

[Bjohnson131]

@marckhouzam Interesting. would you like a PR for docs on this?

[marckhouzam]

That would be nice. I notice we don’t have any doc about repeating flags

[Bjohnson131]

Sounds good, I'll work a PR tonight 👍🏻

[Luap99]

spf13/pflag does actually have CountVar() CountVarP() function to define a flag just like that AFAICT but I have never used a count flag myself so I don't know.

https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/spf13/pflag@v1.0.7#FlagSet.CountVar