--help isn't even the lowest common denominator. An incorrect argument list is. The program knows it was given incorrect arguments, it should show help.
MariaDB also doesn't print the entire manual when it goes "syntax error at ' OR 1=1". It makes no sense.
You can include "See --help for more information" at the end of every error to make sure everyone knows where to find that, though, since indeed not every program uses the same syntax for usage. 90% of the time I don't need a copy of a program's manual in my scrollback when I, say ,typo something or forgot that two options are incompatible. There is a reason scrollback exists and I use it for that purpose. I'll look up the manual or run --help in another terminal tab/window, or choose to run it in the current one at my own discretion thank you
Genuinely my least favorite thing in the terminal is when I forget some detail about... usually CURL, since they use the capitals AND the lowercase letter arguments for very different things. So I end up having to use the / command in `less` to search for some common word for 3-5 minutes because the manpage is so disorganized. We have a much better tool than the Terminal for viewing long-form text content, so maybe I just need to alias `man` to open a website that publishes manpages.
But asking for `--help` is unambiguous, and is in fact the lowest common denominator way to be explicit about it.
a) use bash-like behaviour of an unmatched glob turning into a bare word, e.g with zsh have `setopt NULL_GLOB`.
AND
b) don't have a file named, say, `-a` in the current working directory.
Try this:
touch ./-l
ls -?
That's... not what a common denominator means. It's far easier to check for `--help` or `-h` and print _something_ than write a whole document in a weird markup language for man.
man(1) is, provided that people produce man pages. It's also orthogonal and composable without interference: one can write a man page for commands that don't have man pages.
Flags are not, because commands parse their arguments in whatever way; all commands can accept arguments but arguments are also part of the operational interface contract. man(1) is decoupling all possible problems out.
It is also extremely obvious than `man foo` is side-effect free, whereas `foo whatever`, whether `whatever` can be `--help` or anything else, has unknown effects when the command is unknown.
Some argue that man pages are too rich; well the man pages can just also start with a summary identical to what a hypothetical `--help` flag would output.
Turns out this is the conventional `SYNOPSYS` title of section 1 man pages, and possibly the `OPTIONS` one; if these are absent or badly written then one could reasonably posit that a hypothetical `--help` flag output would be just as unhelpful; cue the wads of commands that "--helpfully" output `foo [-4236xXksirtTgsdv]` as help, which tells you nothing really helpful.
`info(1)` can burn in hell though.
These days, I'm positively surprised when I find man pages for a program, whereas I'm annoyed when one doesn't support --help.
They're absolutely trivial to generate these days, gone are the days of having to deal with roff, you can write a quite dumb markdown file and produce a man page out of it in short order.
https://github.com/sunaku/md2man/blob/master/EXAMPLE.markdow...
https://github.com/rtomayko/ronn/blob/master/man/ronn-format...
There are people arguing that? My feeling is that man pages are usually so thin as to be useless in 50%+ scenarios I need them. I really wished the culture defaulted to expecting all software to come with Info pages.
Rather:
b) don't have a file with a single letter name in your CWD, like `a`
Try this:
touch a
ls -?
I don't see it. What are you trying to show with 'a' instead of '-l'? Why would a file named 'a' interact with a glob like '-?'?
$ touch a
$ ls -?
zsh: no matches found: -?
$ bash -c 'ls -?'
ls: invalid option -- '?'
Try 'ls --help' for more information.
$ dash -c 'ls -?'
ls: invalid option -- '?'
Try 'ls --help' for more information.
$ touch ./-l
$ ls -?
.rw-rw-r-- 0 user 10 Feb 18:32 -l
.rw-rw-r-- 0 user 10 Feb 18:31 a'?' is glob for one character, '-?' means "dash followed by any character", and that's what I'd expect to be matched, and that's what my `ls` does.
but `a` is not "dash followed by one character" so the glob does not match a `a` file?
my haha nearby was wrong! I should have tested it :)
Normally, ls doesn't expand globs.
Why did you say to try "touch a; ls -?"? What am I supposed to see from those two commands?
If you already know the content, but accidentally made a typo and are trying to debug it, then reading the documentation isn't going to help. An error message pointing out the problem will help.
And at high levels, a referee role is probably similar to physician/lawyer where you'll have annual rule updates/changes, jurisprudence history of past rulings, and conventions/associations of referees where they will be spending money, time and effort when not on the field.
Now multiply the referee's game or league types by everything in /usr/bin
This is especially useful in situations where the help text is enormous (dozens and dozens of options).
--help being an incorrect argument does the right thing, yes.