On 03/22/2016 11:56 AM, Ruediger Meier wrote: >> The man page (and --help output) specifically state: >> >> NOTE: your shell may have its own version of true, which >> usually super‐ >> sedes the version described here. Please refer to your >> shell's docu‐ >> mentation for details about the options it supports. > > I knew this note. However in the real world it simply does not make > sense to get a man page about something which is not used usually.
It's not coreutils' fault if distros don't know how to make 'man true' redirect to the shell's man page. > I suggest an enhancement for portability and implementation simplicity > to remove the options --version and --help from true, false echo and [. Sorry, but that would violate GNU Coding Standards, so we aren't going to do it. > > It's a problem that the most used implementations (POSIX or built-ins) > behave differently and users might not be aware this fact when they use > the coreutils implementations by mistake or on purpose. Since the use > cases when somebody really needs a true, false or echo _binary_ are > rare, the probabilty is high that the user assumes well known behavior. The probability that someone knows well-known GCS behavior of '--help' working are also high. At this point, the change would be more disruptive than keeping the status quo. -- Eric Blake eblake redhat com +1-919-301-3266 Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org
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