On Thu, May 28, 2020 at 05:56:09PM +0200, Melvin Vermeeren wrote:
On Thursday, 28 May 2020 17:50:20 CEST Michael Stone wrote:
Yes, running printf with the single argument --help will print help. A
portable and posix-compliant alternative would be to run "printf '%s'
--help". This is extremely unlikely to change.
This is not the only problem that occurs, printing -- does not work either.
same solution will work!
Coreutils should aim for POSIX compliancy, perhaps it would be better if I
take this bug upstream?
You certainly can, but they will probably also consider this to be of
purely academic interest. The solution I provided above is the only
portable way to make what you're trying to do work, regardless of POSIX.
Even if I changed the debian package today, you'd have to continue to do
the above basically forever because of the enormous installed base of
implementations don't work the way you're requesting. And not having the
help output will likely confuse more people who won't know why it
wouldn't work.
