On 2014-09-05 12:26, Ralf Friedl wrote:
Xabier Oneca -- xOneca wrote:
Hello again,
2014-09-05 18:19 GMT+02:00 Xabier Oneca -- xOneca <xon...@gmail.com>:
Hello list,
I want to highlight what GNU coreutils' help docs (info coreutils
'false invocation') says about false when invoked with --help:
Note that `false' (unlike all other programs documented herein)
exits unsuccessfully, even when invoked with `--help' or `--version'.
I think Busybox should do the same with the applet.
And I want to add that --help will only be used ever in an interactive
shell by a person, so the return value may be dispensable. (i.e.
doesn't mind to the user how does --help return as soon as the help
text is printed in screen)
Actually this is the argument to leave it as it is, because nobody cares about
the return value of "false --help".
I care about the value of "false --help". Well, actually, let me rephrase:
I care that I can force a failure by swapping in "false" in somewhere where
a user-supplied command is called, without having to do extra work to
to sanitise the arguments sent to the callback. Being able to force failures
is an important part of being able to debug problems.
I've seen plenty of situations where "--help" can make its way into a command
that wasn't just written by a user in a shell; either intentionally or
unintentionally. Maybe I don't care about what happens when I explicitly,
literally type "false --help" into a shell, and maybe I'm never going
to write "if false --help; then ...; fi" in a script; but even if I don't
care about those, I certainly care what happens when I call "$CMD "$@""
and $CMD just happens to be "false" or "$@" just happens to include "--help".
I assign "false" to variables like "$CMD" quite frequently.
Isn't that exactly the sort of thing that "false" is for?
There's also the issue of "busybox false --help" and "busybox sh -c 'false
--help'"
being incompatible with each other. That's awfully confusing--demonstrated by
the exchange between Harald, Bastian, and myself demonstrates. Maybe it's
possible
to argue that "busybox sh -c 'false --help'" should be changed to also return
EXIT_SUCCESS; but it seems much more natural to me to argue in the other
direction ;)
--
"'tis an ill wind that blows no minds."
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