Portmaster options combo to upgrade FreeBSD ports

Some years ago I was using the famous Portupgrade to maintain my ports. This software is mature, very powerful and easy to use. Unfortunately its dependency on Ruby makes it really cumbersome, especially because I have many jails.

Therefore when Doug Barton began Portmaster, which is written is shell and does more or less the same thing (well, actually less, but I can live with it), I was quite eager to use it. One thing I didn't like from the beginning with Postmaster was that it is not able to work alone: it is constantly asking things. Of course there are options to disable this, but this leads to me the second problem: they are not intuitive! (at least for me...)

After some struggle, I finally managed to find the options I always want to use and I'm writing them as a reminder and in the hope to help someone else in the same hassle:

# portmaster -dBGm BATCH=1 --no-confirm --delete-packages -a

Here are the details:

• I'm using portconf to configure the ports' build knobs, so I don't want to run the configuration or to be asked something about it. Just use the defaults unless I told otherwise: -G -m BATCH=1;
• Don't create a backup package, I'm not running any financial application: -B;
• Don't ask me if the distfiles must be cleaned, just do it: -d;
• Don't ask me if I really want to upgrade my ports, I already executed the command proving it: --no-confirm;
• Remove packages once installed: --delete-packages;
• Upgrade everything: -a, but you might not want to ugprade everything at once so you can replace this with one or more port name.