On Fri, Oct 09, 2026 at 12:57:08PM +0100, Pádraig Brady wrote: > On 09/10/2026 08:52, Collin Funk wrote: > > I think the assumption was that people typically be outputting to a > > terminal, even if the program was piped. E.g., the following: > > > > $ chroot --help | grep -F userspec > > > > Would emit the option with the link included. > > Also the more general point that one generally doesn't > want to programmatically process --help output, > apart from piping to a pager.
Personally, I have almost never _not_ wanted to pipe --help output to grep, especially for GNU tools which tend to have very long help text... And if you also use GNU grep's --color option, this can corrupt the control sequences emitted by e.g. env --help and the problem gets even worse, not to mention the possibility of surprising matches against the control sequences. The secondary problem is that tools are emitting terminal control sequences without any regard for whether or not the terminal actually understands them. If it does not, the entire output is just line noise. For --help, that just seems crazy to me. Anyway since the configure options work now, the problem is solved as far as I am concerned.
