POSIX talks about it a little bit: http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_chap12.html http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/based

POSIX talks about it a little bit: http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_chap12.html http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_... Some argument-handling libraries like Python's argparse and PHP's Symfony Console generate usage help for you, and they all use a relatively similar formatting that i think was inspired by the formatting of man pages: http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/man-pages.7.html http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/man-pages.7.html docopt (http://docopt.org/ http://docopt.org/) is an attempt to standardise it from the other way around — instead of you defining the options in the code and it generating the usage help for you, you write the usage help and it generates the code to define the options. But i don't know that it's super widely used.