Re: cat: invalid option -- h

Hi,

Sounds like you have the best position

Regards

JG

Jim Meyering wrote:
> "J. Grant" <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
>>Thanks for the reply. I think -h is almost exclusivly used for help
>>normally.
> 
> 
> Sorry.  Adding a short-named option to *any* command is never done
> lightly.  This has been debated a few times over the last 10 years.
> One problem is that there are always exceptions.  For chown and chgrp,
> -h means --no-dereference.  For df, du, and ls, -h means --human-readable.
> And there are a few more.  Besides, if I were to add -h == --help for cat,
> what's to stop me from adding for the 80 or so other programs in the
> coreutils package that don't yet have a -h option?
> 
> Just use --help or `--h'.
> 
> 
>>I noticed that some UNIX machines output cat --help on stderr, I think
>>the current approach of printing on stdout is more useful.  Is this a
>>common GNU style to use stdout instead of stderr?
> 
> 
> The GNU Coding Standards
> 
>   http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards_toc.html
> 
> says --help output should be written to stdout.
> If you find a GNU program that does otherwise, and once
> you've verified that it's still a problem with the latest
> release, please report it;  it's a bug.
>