Comment by ryandrake
14 hours ago
GNU offers guidance[1] to output --help to stdout, but it's not against the law to do it your way.
1: https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/_002d_002dhelp....
14 hours ago
GNU offers guidance[1] to output --help to stdout, but it's not against the law to do it your way.
1: https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/_002d_002dhelp....
I guess this is a point where I disagree with GNU. Then again, the reasons why I disagree are subtle enough that I don't care too much... I think this particular thing doesn't matter very much in practice, so go do your thing GNU...
I can see both sides. As someone automating, I could see getting the malformed command -h result to stderr. I can also see that sending -h to stdout would be expected as that is the legit out as requested by the user. At the least, if -h is sent to stdout for a malformed command then by gawd it better be a nonzero exit. With that, I think (and boy did it hurt) that it's an okay rule to break
Out of the problems we all agonize over, this is probably a 1 out of 10!