* Casey Allen Shobe <lists@???> [2006-05-18 20:30:54 +0000]:
> > And it's also extremely long. I often do things like "foo --help
> > 2>&1|grep something" in order to find the option I'm looking for (ie. i
> > might like to do "exim --help 2>&1|grep queue" to find out all the
> > options to manipulate the queue).
>
> PAGER=cat man exim | grep whatever.
>
> Or simply /whatever if you use a PAGER such as less, and then you have
> context.
While that is true, it's also not quick... some of those paragraphs are
pretty large. =) Instead of the three paragraphs I see for -bf, I'd
like to see:
-bf [filename] run exim in filter testing mode with filter file [filename]
Something like that is much easier to grep. I mean, obviously, this
output won't replace the manpage, and would be more of a summary type
thing than anything else, but I can see it being very handy for things
like unfreezing the queue, etc.
> > The fact that all exim tells me is "options and/or arguments control
> > what it does when it is called" is... well... painfully obvious without
> > being helpful at all.
>
> Would you really want hundreds of lines of --help output? Some of the Gentoo
> portage commands do this, and I find it irritating. Simple fact is, exim has
> many many options.
I don't think it would be hundreds of lines.
Now I feel challenged, however.... =) I'm going to patch exim to do
this and see how big it really is.
--
Annvix - Secure Linux Server:
http://annvix.org/
"lynx -source
http://linsec.ca/vdanen.asc | gpg --import"
{FEE30AD4 : 7F6C A60C 06C2 4811 FA1C A2BC 2EBC 5E32 FEE3 0AD4}
Wasting time like it was free...
