Steven D'Aprano writes: > I have an application written in Python which accepts -h or --help to > show help. I can: > > (1) print the help text to stdout; > > (2) run the help text through a pager; > > (3) do something else? > > > Many command line tools simply output help to stdout (or stderr, if > they're evil), which makes it easy to redirect the help to a file, > pass it to grep, etc. For example: > > [steve@ando ~]$ wget --help | wc -l > 136 > > Other tools automatically launch a pager, e.g. man. (Admittedly, man > --help does not use a pager.) The Python help system, pydoc, does the > same. > > I was thinking that my application could use pydoc: > > def do_help(): > import pydoc > pydoc.pager(HELPTEXT) > > or just print the help text: > > def do_help(): > # Do I really need to show this??? > print(HELPTEXT) > > > but I was thinking of doing both: give my application a subcommand or > an option to display help directly in a pager, while -h and --help > print to stdout as normal. > > What do you think? Too clever?
Keep --help, -h reasonably short and print it to stdout. That's what I expect and then I know what to do with it. An actual man page is the obvious place for more documentation. The --help text can tell where more information is available. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
