Re^4: Output of a command

It's a pet peeve of mine for help text explicitly requested to go to stderr. If I asked for it, and it's long, please put it on stdout so I don't have to work harder to pipe it into $PAGER. Of course, if something's wrong and you need to give me an error message with some helpful text, it's fine to put it on stderr to lessen the chance of breaking my pipes.

Comment on Re^4: Output of a command

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Re^5: Output of a command by Anomynous Monk (Scribe) on Jul 30, 2008 at 06:35 UTC
Yeah. Help going to stderr also breaks the --help\|less idiom.	[reply]
Re^6: Output of a command by parv (Parson) on Jul 30, 2008 at 06:40 UTC
... then frustratingly one invokes `p --help 2>&1 \| q` (in a bourne like shell).	[reply] [d/l]
Re^6: Output of a command by Fletch (Bishop) on Jul 30, 2008 at 15:06 UTC
Which is why you should use a better shell and just use `--help \|& less` instead (and set up abbrevs so you can just type `,le SPC` which expands into `\|& less` for you . . . :). The cake is a lie. The cake is a lie. The cake is a lie.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^7: Output of a command by gaal (Parson) on Jul 30, 2008 at 18:18 UTC
Actually, what I do for this stuff is set up the following in my .bashrc: `# automatically keep output of commands in a logfile for immediate # subsequent inspection alias ll="$PAGER /tmp/last.log" l () { if [ "x$1" = "x" ] ; then echo "did you mean 'll'?" ; \ else /usr/bin/env " $@" 2>&1 \| tee /tmp/last.log ; fi }` [download] `l !!` and then `ll` is less mental load for me.	[reply] [d/l] [select]