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From: Janis Papanagnou on 4 Feb 2010 17:35
Stephane CHAZELAS wrote:
> 2010-02-04, 23:11(+01), Janis Papanagnou:
>> Ivan Shmakov wrote:
>>> Agreed. Though personally I tend to use $ COMMAND --help first.
>>>
>> How well does COMMAND --help work on current Unixes (AIX, HP-UX, Solaris,
>> etc.)? When I used those systems (and others like UTS, old SunOS, etc.) in
>> the past they don't seem to have supported --OPTION at all, AFAIR.
> [...]
>
> a useful one is "COMMAND -:" (":" can't be a valid option for
> commands using getopt, so you're likely to get an error message
> and a usage summary). Alternatively, you can use -\? but it's
> longer to type.

Occasionally I had used -h or -? (modulo pathological filenames/globbing
effects). But the problem with all those was that they were non-standard
(in the sense of not conforming to any consistent determined concept);
every command had it's own behaviour. Some didn't output anything, some
gave a synopsis, some a help page, some an error message. The man pages,
OTOH, "just worked" and provided that synopsis in the first few lines.

Janis

>
> whatis or man -f, strings...
>
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