> you can't find out what flag to pass without being able to invoke the help text in the first place man command *ducks* Seriously, though, man pages are n

> you can't find out what flag to pass without being able to invoke the help text in the first place man command *ducks* Seriously, though, man pages are not perfect (among other things because they only work as a quick reference for commands with a small amount of knobs), but I do think that the tension you are referring to is best resolved by accessing the option reference through an out-of-band mechanism (even if it is actually stored in-band, such as when using the ancient ident(1) to retreive version strings). > what would it mean to invoke `python` or `docker` with a request for "human-readable sizes"? I will not deny my desire for a common glossary of short options (see the train wreck that is the SysV / GNU coreutils delimited-text suite), but at the same time I don't think it's realistic for every option letter to have a single meaning throughout the whole of the system, which is how you seem to have interpreted my statement. I do think that being able to type -h instead of --help is less valuable than being able to not use a contrived second-choice letter for something else that really wants to be called -h.