After some further testing, it turns out that by design, "zanata-cli push" produce help for push. It needs -s and -t to make the zanata-cli actually perform push.

So running "zanata-cli push -s . -t." on non zanata directory did return the expected exit code (1).

However, it is not really Linux convention that options are required to actually execute subcommands.

So this bug should really be:
zanata-cli <subcommand> should perform subcommand without any options.

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Go to a directory that does not contain zanata.xml (such as /)
2. zanata-cli push
3. echo $?
4. Go to a directory that does contain zanata.xml and source document
5. zanata-cli push

Actual results:
After Step 2, help for push is shown.
After Step 3, 0 is returned
After Step 5, help for push is shown.

Expected results:
After Step 2, error message "zanata.xml is not found" should be shown.
After Step 3, 1 should be returned.
After Step 5, push should be executed.

It's perfectly reasonable for subcommands to have required options, and srcDir/transDir are currently required options.  However:

- I have been thinking that srcDir and transDir should possibly default to "." as in the maven and python clients, in other words cease to be required options

- If the user does omit a required option, we should output the help to stderr (if possible) and return non-zero.

If we do decide on default values for srcDir and transDir, that should be a separate RFE.  In the meantime, we should definitely not return 0 when a required option is missing.

(In reply to Sean Flanigan from comment #2)
> It's perfectly reasonable for subcommands to have required options, and
> srcDir/transDir are currently required options.  

In that case, put those required options as, well, arguments, i.e. no '-' prefix. 

See 'man cp' as an example of multiple required options.

Refer man pages and behavior of 'git' and 'ip' for the command that requires sub command.

Option should just be optional.

I agreed  the rest of your comment.

> However:
> 
> - I have been thinking that srcDir and transDir should possibly default to
> "." as in the maven and python clients, in other words cease to be required
> options
> 
> - If the user does omit a required option, we should output the help to
> stderr (if possible) and return non-zero.
> 
> If we do decide on default values for srcDir and transDir, that should be a
> separate RFE.  In the meantime, we should definitely not return 0 when a
> required option is missing.

The default srcDir and destDir is tracked with Bug 1038852.

(In reply to Ding-Yi Chen from comment #3)
> (In reply to Sean Flanigan from comment #2)
> > It's perfectly reasonable for subcommands to have required options, and
> > srcDir/transDir are currently required options.  
> 
> In that case, put those required options as, well, arguments, i.e. no '-'
> prefix. 
> 
> See 'man cp' as an example of multiple required options.
> 
> Refer man pages and behavior of 'git' and 'ip' for the command that requires
> sub command.
> 
> Option should just be optional.

Okay, so grammatically speaking, we shouldn't call it an "option" if it's required.

But just because it is announced with a '-' doesn't mean it can't ever be required.  The good thing about using options for this sort of thing is that you can put them in any order, and it's easy to tell which argument is which, because eg, the source directory is always preceded by -s or --src-dir.  (A bit like named method parameters in some programming languages.)

I agree that non-optional options should be used rarely, and it seems to be a bad idea for srcDir/transDir to be required, at least for push.

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