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in reply to Re^3: Output of a command
in thread 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.

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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.
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      ... then frustratingly one invokes p --help 2>&1 | q (in a bourne like shell).
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      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.

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        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.

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