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As this debate has raged on for nearly a week (or more?) now, I think it is time we propose a new approach to resolve once and for all this "help switch dilemma." Common shells should recognize the event of a particular key sequence, such as "F1" and trigger a standardized function which exists in the context. That is, a blank command line will trigger a helpMessage function in the shell, and if a command is present, the helpMessage function will be invoked for the given binary. That function may choose to print a help message or load a manual. If command line arguments are present, it may provide specific details based on some strategy, such as which argument does the cursor currently rest on or maybe the last one on the list. If this hypothetical helpMessage function is not implemented, such as for legacy binaries, the shell could look up details from a web service which connects to a known database of manuals or other information. If that service is not available, it could simply query Google with the binary name and any command line arguments the user supplied, along with details about the platform and distribution. In the latter case, the user would be asked if they are feeling lucky. If not, a list of results is displayed in the shell which the user can select to display in a web browser. Should the user not find any relevant information from the query, a service "helpd" will then spam any related newsgroups with a "help, what does this do?" message, including the parameters of the Google query. The helpd process will then poll the newsgroups for responses to the thread and, ideally, use some spam filtering mechanism to block flames and requests the user RTFM (which, ironically, does not exist provided we have gotten this far) while allowing real responses through. Once received, these responses should be shuttled to the mailbox of the user making the request or sent as SMS messages to cell phone, et cetera. If all of this does not help, the user could try invoking the command with a -h, --help flag to get the arguments. Satirically yoursThere's stuff above here
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