Re: A simple hate today.

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From: Phil Pennock
Subject: Re: A simple hate today.
Date: 13:13 on 26 May 2006
On 2006-05-25 at 11:30 -0500, David Champion wrote:
> But the larger point is that an exception occurs (-h is not recognized
> as an option) which triggers an error message.  Given the history of
> -h, why should that error not be help itself, rather than metahelp?

Because if the program has to deal much with files and there's ever a
risk of dealing differently with symlinks, you're looking at the BSDish
semi-standardised options for dealing with that and having to learn
"oops, no, this program uses that other letter instead" is a bitch.

I'm not defending the choice of '-h' for this, merely pointing it out; a
sometimes surprising number of commands end up needing special-casing
for symlinks, which suggests a less than ideal design in and of itself.

"-h" means "act on a symlink itself, rather than the file pointed to".
"-H" means "follow symlinks pointing to directories, when traversing".
etc etc.

See chmod, chown, ln, etc etc.

:^(
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