no

no is a console program that toggles the presence of a leading no on lines of text piped through it. I wrote it to more easily bulk-configure Cisco devices, where prefixing a command with no negates it — so flipping a whole config block on or off becomes a single pass through no.

Toggle in action

By default each line is toggled: lines that start with no have it removed, and lines that don't have it added. Leading indentation is preserved, so it works cleanly on indented configuration blocks:

input	cat config.txt \| no
interface GigabitEthernet0/1 shutdown no ip address no cdp enable	no interface GigabitEthernet0/1 no shutdown ip address cdp enable

What's new in this version

NEW Indentation aware. Leading whitespace is preserved and the no is added or removed after the indent — perfect for nested Cisco config.
NEW Reads files too. Pass one or more file names (or - for stdin) instead of, or in addition to, piping.
NEW Case-insensitive matching with -i, so NO is recognised as well as no .
NEW Newline-faithful. A trailing newline is emitted only if the input line had one; blank and whitespace-only lines pass straight through.
NEW Predictable CLI. Unknown options are reported as errors, -- ends option parsing, and -a/-d/-t follow last-one-wins.
Ships with a Makefile (make, make check, make install, make deb), a man page, and a test suite.

Usage

no [OPTION]... [FILE]...

With no FILE, or when FILE is -, no reads standard input.

Option	Description
`-t`, `--toggle`	Default behavior: add `no` where it is missing, remove it where present.
`-a`, `--add`	Always add a leading `no` if it isn't present; never strip.
`-d`, `--delete`	Always strip a leading `no` if it is present; never add.
`-i`, `--ignore-case`	Match a leading `no` case-insensitively (e.g. `NO` ).
`-v`, `--version`	Print version information and exit.
`-h`, `--help`	Print a usage summary and exit (also `--usage`, `-?`).

-t, -a, and -d are mutually exclusive; the last one given wins. --add and --delete are idempotent, and a double --toggle round-trips back to the original text.

More examples

# toggle a whole file (pipe or pass the file directly)
cat config.txt | no
no config.txt

# unconditionally strip every leading 'no '
no --delete config.txt

# build a "negated" copy of a config to paste in and undo changes
no --add running-config.txt > undo.txt

# normalise mixed-case 'No '/'NO ' while toggling
no -i config.txt

Building & installing

Requires a C++ compiler (g++ by default) and make.

make           # build ./no
make check     # run the test suite
sudo make install            # install to /usr/local
sudo make install PREFIX=/usr

# Debian/Ubuntu/Kali: build and install a .deb (program + man page)
make deb
sudo dpkg -i no_*.deb

License

GPLv3 or later. See the source header for details.

Download:


Listing directory https://download.elifulkerson.com/files/no/0.2:
 Makefile                                         June 01 2026 05:36:38                2182     makefile script, ASCII text, with very long lines
 README.md                                        June 01 2026 05:36:38                2967     UTF-8 Unicode text
 no                                               June 01 2026 05:37:15               28736     ELF 64-bit LSB pie executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2, BuildID[sha1]=1cc75fc15e879610d75f083b910c4046cfd5932b, for GNU/Linux 3.2.0, not stripped
 no.1                                             June 01 2026 05:36:38                2500     troff or preprocessor input, ASCII text
 no.asc                                           June 01 2026 05:39:13                 801     GnuPG signature
 no.cpp                                           June 01 2026 05:36:38                5599     C++ source, ASCII text
 no.md5                                           June 01 2026 05:39:13                  37     MD5 checksum
 no.sha1                                          June 01 2026 05:39:13                  45     SHA1 checksum
 no.sha256                                        June 01 2026 05:39:13                  69     SHA256 checksum
 no.sha512                                        June 01 2026 05:39:13                 133     SHA512 checksum
 no_0.2_amd64.deb                                 June 01 2026 05:37:57                9968     Debian binary package (format 2.0)
 no_0.2_amd64.deb.asc                             June 01 2026 05:39:21                 801     GnuPG signature
 no_0.2_amd64.deb.md5                             June 01 2026 05:39:21                  51     MD5 checksum
 no_0.2_amd64.deb.sha1                            June 01 2026 05:39:21                  59     SHA1 checksum
 no_0.2_amd64.deb.sha256                          June 01 2026 05:39:21                  83     SHA256 checksum
 no_0.2_amd64.deb.sha512                          June 01 2026 05:39:21                 147     SHA512 checksum
 tests                                            June 01 2026 05:42:45                   -     directory
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