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Date:      Fri, 25 Jun 1999 09:16:20 +0200 (METDST)
From:      hm@hcs.de (Hellmuth Michaelis)
To:        imp@harmony.village.org (Warner Losh)
Cc:        des@flood.ping.uio.no, bde@zeta.org.au, hm@hcs.de, cvs-all@FreeBSD.org, cvs-committers@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: cvs commit: src/usr.sbin/i4b/isdnd main.c src/usr.sbin/i4b/isdndebug main.c src/usr.sbin/i4b/isdndecode main.c src/usr.s
Message-ID:  <m10xQDk-0000fqC@hcswork.hcs.de>
In-Reply-To: <199906250653.AAA42025@harmony.village.org> from Warner Losh at "Jun 25, 99 00:53:31 am"

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From the keyboard of Warner Losh:

> : http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908799/xsh/getopt.html
> 
> I guess I was unclear.  This page, as well as our man pages, say that
> getopt returns '?' when it encounters a bad option.  Neither this web
> page, nor our man page, state that it is illegal to have '?' in the
> options string, nor do they say that -? is illegal.  This is splitting 
> a very fine hair, 

This is true, but we're talking about a fundamental feature of every
interactive program - getting basic help (and no, not man prog .. ;-) ).

IMHO, the flag which is used to get help should not bring an error message
back to the user.

> I personally think encouraging -? is dangerous given its potential
> danger, as others have pointed out

Good. I can accept that and switch to using another flag for getting
help - BUT i think also that FreeBSD should use this flag consistently
for all or most of the programs and it should be documented in a well
known and easy to find place.

What should the help flag character be ?

hellmuth
-- 
Hellmuth Michaelis                                    Tel   +49 40 559747-70
HCS Hanseatischer Computerservice GmbH                Fax   +49 40 559747-77
Oldesloer Strasse 97-99                               Mail  hm [at] hcs.de
22457 Hamburg                                         WWW   http://www.hcs.de


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