True. It’s rare to see a tool that discloses its used environment variables in a help command, and would be extremely helpful.
That said, I would still prefer to use the typical -h/--help argument to display it, instead of a HELP environment variable. Reasoning being:
Familiarity.
A tool can warn me when it doesn’t recognize an argument. If it’s expecting -help instead of --help, it can warn me with “I don’t recognize --help”, so I can try other things like -help. On the other side, if I run HELP= tool and nothing happens, I need to go to the documentation, because the tool doesn’t give any feedback, and I wouldn’t expect feedback from a tool when it doesn’t recognize an environment variable.
There’s a curious case when important environment variables may come from libraries or the language runtime itself. Like the somewhat infamous OCAMLRUNPARAM.
True. It’s rare to see a tool that discloses its used environment variables in a
helpcommand, and would be extremely helpful.That said, I would still prefer to use the typical
-h/--helpargument to display it, instead of aHELPenvironment variable. Reasoning being:-helpinstead of--help, it can warn me with “I don’t recognize--help”, so I can try other things like-help. On the other side, if I runHELP= tooland nothing happens, I need to go to the documentation, because the tool doesn’t give any feedback, and I wouldn’t expect feedback from a tool when it doesn’t recognize an environment variable.There’s a curious case when important environment variables may come from libraries or the language runtime itself. Like the somewhat infamous OCAMLRUNPARAM.
I’d prefer to see such info in
--helpas well.Thanks for the feedback! I will try and see if I can take over the help message because this is a very good idea.