Command line

Commands

Command	What it does
dotnet dress	Same as dotnet dress format.
dotnet dress format	Formats the selected files and reports how many changed.
dotnet dress check	Lists the selected files that need formatting. Writes nothing.
dotnet dress init	Adds every missing rule, set to its default, to an EditorConfig file.
dotnet dress interactive	Opens the rule editor in your browser. See Choosing your rules.

Options

format and check accept these options. The bare dotnet dress command does too, except that --include, --staged and --changed must follow an explicit format or check.

Option	Effect
--include <pattern>	Selects files matching a glob relative to the current directory, such as src/**/*.cs or a single file name. Repeat to add more. Quote the pattern so your shell doesn’t expand it.
--staged	Selects only files whose staged content differs from HEAD. format also stages what it rewrites.
--changed	Selects only files that differ from HEAD, plus untracked files.
--verbose	Lists each changed file, and says so when nothing was selected.
--configuration <name>	The MSBuild configuration used to read your projects. Defaults to Debug.

--staged and --changed can’t be combined, and both need a Git repository. In a repository with no commits yet, they select every file.

init takes --target <path>, the EditorConfig file to write. It defaults to .editorconfig in the current directory, and is created if missing. A setting already present in any section is left unchanged. New settings go into the last [*.cs] section, or a new one at the end of the file.

interactive takes --config <path>, an EditorConfig file or the directory holding one. Without it, DressSharp uses the nearest .editorconfig in the current directory or above.

Which files are formatted

Without --include, DressSharp selects every .cs file in the current directory and below. Inside a Git repository it skips anything Git ignores, the same way git status does. Generated files, .csx scripts, and symbolic links are always skipped.

DressSharp reads each file’s project to learn its C# language version and preprocessor symbols, so code in #if blocks is handled the way the compiler sees it. A file compiled several ways, by several projects or by several frameworks of one, is formatted under each in turn, so a region one of them disables is still formatted by another. Should they disagree about a line’s layout, DressSharp says so and leaves the file as it is. When a project can’t be read, or is set to a C# version DressSharp doesn’t understand, DressSharp says so once on standard error, leaves that project’s files as they are, and carries on with the rest.

How files are written

• Only files whose formatting changes are rewritten. Unchanged files keep their exact bytes.
• Files are read using their byte order mark, or else as UTF-8, falling back to Latin-1. UTF-16 without a byte order mark isn’t detected. The charset rule decides the encoding a file is written in.
• Files are replaced atomically. A file that changes on disk while DressSharp is working on it is left alone.
• Code DressSharp can’t parse, and code around preprocessor directives it can’t safely reformat, is left as it is. The rest of the file is still formatted.

Exit codes

Code	Meaning
0	Success. For check, no files need formatting.
1	check found files that need formatting.
2	Something went wrong: an invalid option, an invalid EditorConfig value, or a file that couldn’t be read or written.