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Add docs for mod -a --noinherit option
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and further clarify `mod -a` docs:
Even though e39dcfc and the linked discussion
already does a very good job on clarifying what is actually happening when `mod
-a` is issued, this commit adds further details about the difference between
the album query and what is actually modified.
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JOJ0 committed Aug 6, 2023
1 parent fab2d90 commit 018910d
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8 changes: 6 additions & 2 deletions docs/reference/cli.rst
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Expand Up @@ -257,7 +257,7 @@ modify
``````
::

beet modify [-MWay] [-f FORMAT] QUERY [FIELD=VALUE...] [FIELD!...]
beet modify [-IMWay] [-f FORMAT] QUERY [FIELD=VALUE...] [FIELD!...]

Change the metadata for items or albums in the database.

Expand All @@ -274,13 +274,17 @@ name into the artist field for all your tracks,
and ``beet modify title='$track $title'`` will add track numbers to their
title metadata.

The ``-a`` switch also operates on albums in addition to the individual tracks.
The ``-a`` option changes to querying album fields instead of track fields and
also enables to operate on albums in addition to the individual tracks.
Without this flag, the command will only change *track-level* data, even if all
the tracks belong to the same album. If you want to change an *album-level*
field, such as ``year`` or ``albumartist``, you'll want to use the ``-a`` flag
to avoid a confusing situation where the data for individual tracks conflicts
with the data for the whole album.

Modifications issued using ``-a`` by default cascade to individual tracks. To
prevent this behaviour, ``-I/--noinherit`` can be used.

Items will automatically be moved around when necessary if they're in your
library directory, but you can disable that with ``-M``. Tags will be written
to the files according to the settings you have for imports, but these can be
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