On 2006-05-25 at 11:30 -0500, David Champion wrote: > But the larger point is that an exception occurs (-h is not recognized > as an option) which triggers an error message. Given the history of > -h, why should that error not be help itself, rather than metahelp?
Because if the program has to deal much with files and there's ever a risk of dealing differently with symlinks, you're looking at the BSDish semi-standardised options for dealing with that and having to learn "oops, no, this program uses that other letter instead" is a bitch. I'm not defending the choice of '-h' for this, merely pointing it out; a sometimes surprising number of commands end up needing special-casing for symlinks, which suggests a less than ideal design in and of itself. "-h" means "act on a symlink itself, rather than the file pointed to". "-H" means "follow symlinks pointing to directories, when traversing". etc etc. See chmod, chown, ln, etc etc. :^( -- VISTA: Viruses, Infections, Spyware, Trojans & Adware
