command: terraform state rm to require at least one argument

[apparentlymart]

Due to how the state filter machinery works, passing no arguments is valid and matches all resources.

It is very unlikely that someone wants to remove everything from state, so this ends up being a very dangerous default for the terraform state rm command, and surprising for someone who perhaps runs it looking for the usage information.

So we'll be pragmatic here and reject the no-arguments case for this command, accepting that it makes the unlikely case of intentionally deleting all resources harder in order to make it less likely that it will happen unintentionally.

If someone does really want to remove all resources from the state, they can provide an explicit empty string argument, but this isn't documented because it's a weird case that doesn't seem worth mentioning.

This fixes #15283.

[jwdinkel]

Thank you for describing the empty string argument.

I think the example of deleting everything should be included in the documentation.
Delete all:
terraform state rm ""
After which
terraform init
will cause the system to be ready to execute a new deployment without modifying previous deployments. Perhaps useful if copying a folder that was previously used for another purpose. I think this is equivalent to deleting the tfstate except that it has the benefit of generating a tfstate backup file every time the rm command is executed, which might be useful.

[i255d]

How do we delete everything?

[ghost]

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