command line options

[David L. Smith]

 In article <7652 at brl-smoke.ARPA>, gwyn at brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn ) writes:
 > In article <191 at sdeggo.UUCP> dave at sdeggo.UUCP (David L. Smith) writes:
 > >There's a basic flaw in this little scheme, why doesn't
 > >everyone just admit it and come up with a better idea?
 > 
 > There is NOT a basic flaw in the scheme; I use it all the time
 > and it works much better than the suggested alternatives (which
 > DON'T WORK AT ALL because they are not currently implemented!).
 > Note that I didn't have to do anything to have this feature
 > available; it's already there.  I thought you might like to hear
 > about it so as to be able to exploit it, but feel free to not
 > use it while you work on some grandiose scheme that practically
 > nobody will adopt (as Henry has pointed out).

 I don't see anything grandiose about adding "-HELP" into getopt and having
 that return a '?' to the calling program.  Do you?  This would only require
 recompilation to work.  I doubt there are many existing programs that use
 this for anything other than help, it doesn't conflict with any metacharacters
 and it would be very easy to implement.

 The "-?" would not be useful with those programs like sed and grep which 
 process regular expressions.  

 > If you think the existence of shell metacharacters is a "basic
 > flaw", well perhaps it is if you plop naive users in front of
 > a terminal running a raw Bourne shell or csh.  They were not
 > intended to serve as naive-user interfaces.  Somehow I don't
 > have trouble with this even when using the -? trick.
 
 This is _not_ what I said.  Overloading these operators in fifteen different
 ways is a problem.  We have too many overloaded shell operators as it is.
 Why make more trouble?

 Maybe I'm just not as smart or as nimble-fingered as you are Doug, but I
 forget to quote things sometimes, or the \ key sticks after I press it
 the fifth time in a row in a single command line.  I appreciate the shells'
 power, and hence their complexity, but there is no need to add needless
 complexity.
 
-- 
David L. Smith
{sdcsvax!jack,ihnp4!jack, hp-sdd!crash, pyramid, uport}!sdeggo!dave
sdeggo!dave at amos.ling.edu 
Sinners can repent, but stupid is forever.