On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 7:54 PM, Suraj Kurapati <sun...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 8:40 AM, Alexander Teinum <atei...@gmail.com> wrote: >> What is the most concise way of outputting a usage and help text? > > For my programs, the --help option simply displays their manpage. :-)
Alternatively, in simple shell scripts (for which writing a manpage would be overkill), I simply print the script file's comment header using sed(1): #!/bin/sh # your program description & usage documentation here # nicely formatted and beautified to fit 80 columns # NOTE: the blank line below is the end of the file comment header # check command-line usage if test "$#" -lt 3; then sed -n '2,/^$/s/^# \?//p' "$0" # show this file's comment header exit 1 fi
