Re: unrecognized option '--help

Tom Lane wrote:
> Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> writes:
> > Michael Paquier wrote:
> >> It is wanted this way for all the utilities of src/bin. See
> >> handle_help_version_opts() in src/bin/scripts/common.c for your case.
>
> > Is it really wanted? I find it very annoying and wish it didn't do
> > that.
>
> I think the only thing that would do what you wanted would be to
> recognize *any* argv element matching "--help" as a help request.
> Maybe that's all right, but I'm a tad worried about the possibility
> of false positives. Are we so sure that that string could never be
> a database name, table name, etc?

Hah. This reminds me of my time at the university when guys created
files named "-fr" in other people's home directories to wreak havoc when
the poor sods wanted to remove them.

If you have a database called --help you should probably still be able
to connect to it using any of:

psql --dbname=--help
psql -d --help
psql -- --help

I think it's perfectly reasonable to not recognize --help when it can be
considered an argument to the previous option.

--
Álvaro Herrera http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
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