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Comment by jolux | Hacker News Reader

  zsh: command not found: help

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Python help: Can’t open file ‘help’: [Errno 2] No such file or directory

Python -help: Unknown option: -e

Python —-help: actual help

Stupid users, it’s so intuitive!

(PS it always bugs me that every program uses a different option for checking the version. Node is -v, python is -V, dotnet is —-version. Again, couldn’t be more intuitive, duck users, right?)

I actually didn't know about python -V! python also accepts --version, but if you give it -v, that's verbose, which will only confuse people more. I believe java used to only accept -version with one hyphen, but now it accepts --version with two as well.

OpenBSD has a help command that’s basically just an alias for man, except without arguments it opens the manpage for help(1)¹. GNU help is a bash builtin for help with bash builtins, but does redirect to more general help.

  GNU bash, version 5.0.17(1)-release (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)
  These shell commands are defined internally.  Type `help' to see this list.
  Type `help name' to find out more about the function `name'.
  Use `info bash' to find out more about the shell in general.
  Use `man -k' or `info' to find out more about commands not in this list.

¹https://man.openbsd.org/help

yes, but now you know, into which shell you were dumped, and can gogle next steps! Don't you fully read the posts you reply to?

I read your post. You’re assuming a level of confidence that most non-programmers don’t have. I googled that exact message and nothing helpful came up.

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