I have an application written in Python which accepts -h or --help to show help. I can:
(1) print the help text to stdout; (2) run the help text through a pager; (3) do something else? Many command line tools simply output help to stdout (or stderr, if they're evil), which makes it easy to redirect the help to a file, pass it to grep, etc. For example: [steve@ando ~]$ wget --help | wc -l 136 Other tools automatically launch a pager, e.g. man. (Admittedly, man --help does not use a pager.) The Python help system, pydoc, does the same. I was thinking that my application could use pydoc: def do_help(): import pydoc pydoc.pager(HELPTEXT) or just print the help text: def do_help(): # Do I really need to show this??? print(HELPTEXT) but I was thinking of doing both: give my application a subcommand or an option to display help directly in a pager, while -h and --help print to stdout as normal. What do you think? Too clever? -- Steven -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list