menhir --help

menhir is a command-line program. menhir takes no file arguments and option flags are very few. –help prints usage information. Except, there is one other option, -h, with -h menhir deletes your $HOME.

What is this

• A quip on the lack of standardization of what option characters should mean across the CLI userspace. Moreover, each CLI has what could be counted as an ad-hoc grammar (*) (Does argument order matter to the program on not? Does the program have position restricitions by type of argument? The end-of-options delimiter -- , is a feature of some programs to prevent the program from confounding positional arguments for options, but the fact that you don’t know right away if a program supports -- causes disuse of an otherwise good security habit; Or does the program have a custom cli grammar fitted to its function, like magick or ffmpeg?). A peek into the usage information is necessary. But we can’t even agree on those. Most of the time it’s -h or --help. Some of the time it’s -help or help or -?. The quick -h, my predilect, is almost standard, almost — I’m a bit frustrated when Unrecognized option -h \n Use --help for help!
• It also challenges the assumption that printing help is without side-effects. Packages that automatically run and parse the output of --help, like zsh-completion-generator and GNU help2man, could have catastrophic results upon encoutering one random program whose equally informal dialect assings -h or even --help, an entirely different meaning.