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> Unix and its derivatives were made for people who sort of knew what they were doing. [...] You probably shouldn't be touching the shell if you don't know what

> Unix and its derivatives were made for people who sort of knew what they were doing. [...] You probably shouldn't be touching the shell if you don't know what that does. You really do not need to be such a grumpy elitist. People are not born with Unix knowledge already in their heads. Asking questions, raising doubts, and getting answers from more knowledgeable users is a very effective way of learning new things! With that said, can you make an example of a legitimate use of `command1 --help | command2`, where `command2` does something useful and is not `less`?

OJFord 3y ago
I don't mean to disagree with your first paragraph, but I do pipe help to grep (or rg) all the time. (And never to less, who uses a non-paging/scrollback terminal emulator in 2023? Why else would that be beneficial, just to clear it when I've read what I wanted?)
- throwaway46281 3y ago
  I use `less` with help output because if the help output is long, it starts me at the top of the help output rather than the bottom, and the top usually has a nice summary of the command usage that I usually want to read. More importantly, I can easily find things by searching with less's `/` hotkey. Relying on the terminal emulator's built-in search isn't great because (a) I'm not used to it - I am more used to vim's keybindings, and the search hotkey `/` is the same in vim, and (b) that's also going to search all the output from before I ran --help (not as big of a gripe, but still somewhat annoying).
  - dingosity 3y ago
    I can see how that's a reasonable preference. Though I fall in @OjFord's camp. I have a mouse scroll wheel and I'm not afraid to use it. But... I have to remember to hit return a few times beforehand because it's sometimes hard to find the top of help when you're scrolling up in the terminal. And if your brain is wired for vi, then that makes complete sense. But... the cool thing about using the scrollwheel to scroll up to see the --help output is it's always there. If you pipe it into less, it disappears as soon as you exit less. So if you're writing a big, beefy command with lots of unfamiliar options, you can start typing down at the prompt and then scroll up to read the help output. It's annoying when you type that you immediately scroll back down to the bottom of the terminal buffer, and I think all terminal emulators default to doing this, but maybe it's a configurable behaviour. This also works with `man <command> | cat`. Also... how many times have I had to type out `git branch -a | cat` and tried to remember to put the `| cat` in it. I HATE that the stock git cli automagically pipes to /usr/bin/pager. If I wanted to pipe the output to /usr/bin/pager, I would type `command | /usr/bin/pager`. But now I'm just kvetching.
  - OJFord 3y ago
    Yeah ok now you say it I realise I do sometimes pipe help to less too. It's just that typically I'll run it bare or piped to grep/rg first, and potentially stop there. I too don't use terminal search for pretty much the same reason, and just never got into it for whatever reason. (Alacritty has a tonne of great features I just haven't taken the time to learn the muscle memory to use.. ctrl-j/k bindings to scroll back and some custom patterns to open as URLs is about it.)
dingosity 3y ago
Sure. I don't need to be a grumpy elitist. The problem isn't that you get a usage message when you ask for it. It's that you get a usage message (written to STDOUT) when you don't. Many commands will print out the usage message when command line options specify a condition that can't be met. I find this frequently when ssh'ing into busybox based systems. Busybox's find command is much less "refined" than comparable desktop OS finds (BSD & GNU/Linux). So if I do something like: ssh me@foo.example.com "find . -type f | while read line; do sha256sum \$line; done" | tr -s ' ' | cut -f 2,1 -d ' ' | sort | uniq -c And expect output that looks something like a sorted line of hashes, I will be sorely disappointed.

OJFord 3y ago

I don't mean to disagree with your first paragraph, but I do pipe help to grep (or rg) all the time. (And never to less, who uses a non-paging/scrollback terminal emulator in 2023? Why else would that be beneficial, just to clear it when I've read what I wanted?)

throwaway46281 3y ago
I use `less` with help output because if the help output is long, it starts me at the top of the help output rather than the bottom, and the top usually has a nice summary of the command usage that I usually want to read. More importantly, I can easily find things by searching with less's `/` hotkey. Relying on the terminal emulator's built-in search isn't great because (a) I'm not used to it - I am more used to vim's keybindings, and the search hotkey `/` is the same in vim, and (b) that's also going to search all the output from before I ran --help (not as big of a gripe, but still somewhat annoying).
- dingosity 3y ago
  I can see how that's a reasonable preference. Though I fall in @OjFord's camp. I have a mouse scroll wheel and I'm not afraid to use it. But... I have to remember to hit return a few times beforehand because it's sometimes hard to find the top of help when you're scrolling up in the terminal. And if your brain is wired for vi, then that makes complete sense. But... the cool thing about using the scrollwheel to scroll up to see the --help output is it's always there. If you pipe it into less, it disappears as soon as you exit less. So if you're writing a big, beefy command with lots of unfamiliar options, you can start typing down at the prompt and then scroll up to read the help output. It's annoying when you type that you immediately scroll back down to the bottom of the terminal buffer, and I think all terminal emulators default to doing this, but maybe it's a configurable behaviour. This also works with `man <command> | cat`. Also... how many times have I had to type out `git branch -a | cat` and tried to remember to put the `| cat` in it. I HATE that the stock git cli automagically pipes to /usr/bin/pager. If I wanted to pipe the output to /usr/bin/pager, I would type `command | /usr/bin/pager`. But now I'm just kvetching.
- OJFord 3y ago
  Yeah ok now you say it I realise I do sometimes pipe help to less too. It's just that typically I'll run it bare or piped to grep/rg first, and potentially stop there. I too don't use terminal search for pretty much the same reason, and just never got into it for whatever reason. (Alacritty has a tonne of great features I just haven't taken the time to learn the muscle memory to use.. ctrl-j/k bindings to scroll back and some custom patterns to open as URLs is about it.)

dingosity 3y ago

Sure. I don't need to be a grumpy elitist. The problem isn't that you get a usage message when you ask for it. It's that you get a usage message (written to STDOUT) when you don't. Many commands will print out the usage message when command line options specify a condition that can't be met. I find this frequently when ssh'ing into busybox based systems. Busybox's find command is much less "refined" than comparable desktop OS finds (BSD & GNU/Linux). So if I do something like: ssh me@foo.example.com "find . -type f | while read line; do sha256sum \$line; done" | tr -s ' ' | cut -f 2,1 -d ' ' | sort | uniq -c And expect output that looks something like a sorted line of hashes, I will be sorely disappointed.