Frequently Asked Questions

Why must I specify --new when creating a new task?

Perhaps you’re super special and never produce a typo, I’m not. The rdial start --new option is a fix for this common — to me — problem.

The rdial switch command is of related design. You can not use it when no task is running, and attempting to do so is probably a sign you’ve lost track of your state. I consider this to be a massive problem, and would rather not sidestep it by allowing rdial start to stop running tasks or rdial switch to work without a running task.

Where does the name rdial come from?

Around the beginning of 2012 I wrote a very simple shell script to track my time, and at some point I decided it should be safer and cleaner. I came up with an exceedingly clever and imaginative name for this new project, and then promptly forgot how it came about.

Since then I haven’t even managed to come up with a useful backronym for it.

How do I process rdial data files using go?

If you keep receiving ErrTrailingComma errors when reading files using golang it is because you are processing files with empty message fields. The default behaviour of the encoding/csv pkg is to raise an error when it encounters an empty final field. You can tell go to accept empty final fields by setting the TrailingComma attribute on your CSV reader.

reader := csv.NewReader(file)
reader.TrailingComma = true