> You can see there's a big competing pattern of having multiple binaries with the same prefix One could create an entire ecology of tools that operates as a s

> You can see there's a big competing pattern of having multiple binaries with the same prefix One could create an entire ecology of tools that operates as a sort of compromise: Have a family of separate programs named with a common prefix (e.g., foo-), and a dispatch program (foo) that, when run like foo bar options dispatches to foo-bar with the options, and when run like foo [-h|--help] prints a help message and then lists every foo- program on the PATH, incorporating the whatis output where available. (That last bit requires man pages to work, but you can't very well tell people to read a manual that doesn't exist.) I have used this strategy at work with considerable success.