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It is often less verbose than a man page so can be seen entirely without a pager, which is often all you need when you are looking for a reminder of that period
by rkeene2 7y ago
It is often less verbose than a man page so can be seen entirely without a pager, which is often all you need when you are looking for a reminder of that periodically used option. Certainly having both options (man page and inline help) is better than having only one option.
- trasz 7y agoIf you can’t find what you need in the man page, because of the bloat, well, it’s the bloat that’s the problem, not the lack of —help.
- CameronNemo 7y agoNak. Help output can be more concise because it does not have to explain what the command is used for, does not have to enumerate every option for a particular flag, does not need a "See Also" or "Examples" section, etc.
- trasz 7y agoIt's what the SYNOPSIS section is for, at the top of the man page, so you don't need to scroll down in the pager. In a more general sense, though, this is why BSD systems generally try to avoid bloat in the core utilities. It's not about the code size - it never was - but rather the overhead on maintainers and users.