FEATURE REQUEST: Change -W to a safer invocation letter or phrase

[thetasine]

I think it would be in everyone's interest if we changed the -W parameter for warming up the DiskSpd process to be something much different.

This is much to close to -w, which is the percentage in write. If a person makes the very simple mistake of not capitalizing this, they have the opportunity to completely corrupt the disk or file they are working on. I have had this happen twice now, as sometimes a small terminal font makes this easy to overlook.

I suggest we change this to -WU, -warmup or similar.

[dl2n]

That is really unfortunate. If we had a free hand this is a great observation. There are of course other case-sensitive parameters (-t/T -o/O, etc.) but this one does have destructive impact on typos.

The basic challenge is that changing the behavior of an existing parameter - i.e., removing -W - would break existing usage (automated and otherwise).

However, we could add a new parameter convention for warmup/cooldown and that would give folks another way to state it that wouldn't have such a drastic typo case (and deprecate using -W). Thoughts?

[thetasine]

I completely understand the challenge with changing a parameter name in regards to automation.

I think your suggestion to add a new parameter for warmup/cooldown is probably the best solution. I'd love to see this implemented. Maybe over time as you said depreciate the -W variation and give people time to change their scripts as needed.