cgsecurity.org

I've just discovered this great tool, and I could go through my old laptop's harddrive to recover an accidentally deleted backup that I've thought lost for good until now.

However, I believe this program (PhotoRec) could be even more powerful with an non-interactive execution mode: all the options specified by launch parameters, and/or taking default values for each option. This could help many users with less technical knowledge to perform a recovery from a "cheat list" of oneliners.

Well, if you press enter each time, you have the default options...

Yes, but still it would be required the user's intervention, which in fact makes no difference in the real program execution.

In the Linux/Unix world it's a big deal to solve problems with just one line of code - no matter how long and cryptic it is - because that lets you execute it as part of a more complex process, and controlling if each step was successful or not.

And it's not only about using default values, but also to be able to specify all the relevant values (filesystem, for instance) from the command line.