Jim Meyering wrote: > One more point: a long time ago, I too thought about adding -h > as an alias for --help for these 100-or-so programs, but even then, > there were numerous commands for which -h was already accepted, > but with a different meaning.
Yes. That is also an issue. Because -h is so often already used for other things. > Thus, we cannot do it across the board, and > that was another reason not to do it. Agreed. At one time in my lab it was very common to use -? (or more correctly -\?) to get help. This was precisely because it is an invalid option for most programs and at the time most programs would dump a full help usage when parsing an invalid option. And of course the MS-DOS command help option also was similar with /?. From my experience I would say the number of people who try -? to return help exceeds those that try -h. Not suggesting any implementation of this but just to show that culturally there are different expectations for help. (The best one IMNHO being the actual option for help.) Since any invalid option informs the caller about how to get the full help it isn't hard to find. And personally I very much like the behavior that an invalid option just informs the user about how to get the longer full help usage. Very often I have simply made a small mistake that I recognize immediately. If it were to emit the full long help then it would scroll of my my previous work off the top of the terminal. That has been very annoying with commands that have that behavior. I much prefer the current behavior. Bob
