Re: A simple hate today.

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From: jrodman
Subject: Re: A simple hate today.
Date: 19:04 on 25 May 2006
On Thu, May 25, 2006 at 06:44:38PM +0200, H.Merijn Brand wrote:
> On Thu, 25 May 2006 11:30:20 -0500, David Champion <dgc@xxxxxxxx.xxx> wrote:
> 
> > * On 2006.05.25, in <20060525181940.6a7da5ce@pc09>,
> > *	"H.Merijn Brand" <h.m.brand@xxxxxx.xx> wrote:
> > > On Thu, 25 May 2006 09:53:56 -0500 (CDT), sabrina downard <sld@xxxxxxxx.xxx>
> > > wrote:
> > > 
> > > > If you do not have a better use for -h, and you have coded a
> > > > usage statement for --help, then how damned difficult would it
> > > > be to make -h equal to --help?  Since you're already going to
> > > > print a damned error telling me to use --help instead?
> > > 
> > > Sorry, I disagree. And I have never liked -h to be help.
> > > IMHO it should be either -? or --help, and -help could be acceptable
> > 
> > It's not a matter of taste.  It's a matter of UNIX did that for
> > twenty years before GNU came by and made all the kids think
> > different.  If you've been using UNIX long and have not completely
> > soaked yourself in GNUisms, you still just automatically expect -h
> > to work almost everywhere, and --help to work in many places (but
> > not by any means most).
> 
> Huh? I've been using UNIX since 1982. Long enough? I started with
> System III, and then got cought in a job that involved writing Unic
> Device drivers for SLD disks. I've never seen a UNIX command from that
> time that did not support -?

    jrodman@Skonnos:~ >ls -?
    ls: invalid option -- ?
    Try `ls --help' for more information.

There we go.  No -?, and the hateful taunt.

In my experience -? was more common in dos environents which I used
sometimes, so when I want help these days I tend to type

blah -h
blah -?
blah --help

while only barely glancing at the blah output to see if it might be
helpful.

> info pages are useless. Give me plain man pages please, *AND* a useful --help
> or -?

I know this is the hate list, and typical info content is rather
hateful, but consider installing 'pinfo', it's somewhat less hateful to
use than 'info', at least I can reliably quit it without ^Z to suspend
and kill %2.  When a tool is complex enough that I actually need a bit
more of a manual and less of an options listing, sometimes this stuff is
useful.

-josh
There's stuff above here

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