Subject: bug#13737: Add -h option to 'users'

From: Bob Proulx <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 18 Feb 2013 13:01:41 -0700

Jim Meyering wrote:
> One more point: a long time ago, I too thought about adding -h
> as an alias for --help for these 100-or-so programs, but even then,
> there were numerous commands for which -h was already accepted,
> but with a different meaning.

Yes.  That is also an issue.  Because -h is so often already used for
other things.

> Thus, we cannot do it across the board, and
> that was another reason not to do it.

Agreed.

At one time in my lab it was very common to use -? (or more correctly
-\?) to get help.  This was precisely because it is an invalid option
for most programs and at the time most programs would dump a full help
usage when parsing an invalid option.  And of course the MS-DOS
command help option also was similar with /?.  From my experience I
would say the number of people who try -? to return help exceeds those
that try -h.

Not suggesting any implementation of this but just to show that
culturally there are different expectations for help.  (The best one
IMNHO being the actual option for help.)  Since any invalid option
informs the caller about how to get the full help it isn't hard to
find.

And personally I very much like the behavior that an invalid option
just informs the user about how to get the longer full help usage.
Very often I have simply made a small mistake that I recognize
immediately.  If it were to emit the full long help then it would
scroll of my my previous work off the top of the terminal.  That has
been very annoying with commands that have that behavior.  I much
prefer the current behavior.

Bob