Ok, then this looks to me like a bug in Getopt::Long::Descriptive . I want something that behaves more like standard unix utils like rm:

If I type just rm, I get a message that I'm missing a parameter AND the usage information. If I type rm --help I get the help information and no complaints.

In my simple example leaving required out might appear to be a solution, but in practice I might have four or six required arguments, and using moose features could save me about ten lines of code.