Hacker News Reader

Comment by anyfoo | Hacker News Reader

Disagree. stdout is only reserved for actual processed command output. It may be empty, it may be invalid because the input was invalid (shit in, shit out), but it may never be things intended for a human to read.

If one wants to use a pager (like I sometimes do, though most of the time I just scroll up), they'll just use `foo 2>&1 | less`.

View on HN

> stdout is only reserved for actual processed command output

If user asks a program to print help message, the help text is the processed command output!

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!

In the case of `git log -100 | grep FOO`, the log output should go to stdout.

In the case of `git diff | grep FOO`, the diff output should go to stdout.

In the case of `git --help | grep FOO` the help output should go to stdout.

In the case of `git --omg-wtf | grep FOO`, it's fine if there is only output on stderr.

I see you've never tried to run command --help | less

Honestly if your help output requires the use of a pager or a text search utility to be useful I question why you didn’t just write a man page in the first place.

I just said that I always do `command --help 2>&1 | less`?

Pretty annoying. Wouldn't it be good if command --help would just display the help?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com