12 Factor CLI Apps

Re:12 Factor CLI Apps by davidhcefx on Tuesday October 09, 2018 @04:26AM (#18174188)

I myself also love reading man pages, but speaking of compatibility, I have to say that “--help” is a more universal way of showing help pages. Of course it’s better to have both of them though.

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Re:12 Factor CLI Apps by larkeith on Tuesday October 09, 2018 @06:21AM (#18174665)

--help is fine, but almost never a substitute for a full man page, except for the most trivial of applications (unless your --help is as complete as a man page, in which case... good on you for providing full documentation, but I'll hate you a bit every time I unthinkingly drop two hundred lines of text in my terminal.)

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Re:12 Factor CLI Apps by smarinov on Tuesday October 09, 2018 @09:11AM (#18175622)

Unless it just opens the man page if it is so long. Like git.

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Re:12 Factor CLI Apps by JdeBP on Tuesday October 09, 2018 @09:14AM (#18175643)

I strongly suspect that --help is on the contrary less universal, given that there exist entire toolsets lacking the --help convention but having manual pages. There was almost a quarter of a century's worth of Unix tools that developed before --help was invented.

* https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/416796/5132

* https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/207136/

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Re:12 Factor CLI Apps by dickeytk on Wednesday October 10, 2018 @02:15PM (#18187504)

How can you say it's less universal when it doesn't work on windows?

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