"J. Grant" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Thanks for the reply. I think -h is almost exclusivly used for help > normally.
Sorry. Adding a short-named option to *any* command is never done lightly. This has been debated a few times over the last 10 years. One problem is that there are always exceptions. For chown and chgrp, -h means --no-dereference. For df, du, and ls, -h means --human-readable. And there are a few more. Besides, if I were to add -h == --help for cat, what's to stop me from adding for the 80 or so other programs in the coreutils package that don't yet have a -h option? Just use --help or `--h'. > I noticed that some UNIX machines output cat --help on stderr, I think > the current approach of printing on stdout is more useful. Is this a > common GNU style to use stdout instead of stderr? The GNU Coding Standards http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards_toc.html says --help output should be written to stdout. If you find a GNU program that does otherwise, and once you've verified that it's still a problem with the latest release, please report it; it's a bug. _______________________________________________ Bug-textutils mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-textutils
