Or is there maybe a way to set the pager for all help related queries to some command? I’m using bat and would like to pipe all --help through | bat --language=help by default for the syntax highlighting and colored output… Or if you know a lower effort way to color the output of --help let me know.
I think your best bet to to create a script called help and run “help <command>” and the script would do the rest.
I think this is the correct answer in all honesty. Create a new script like help (or man2 or whatever) that pipes the argument through bat for you.
There has to be a hook somewhere for every command that executes. I’m not sure, but something in the chain after using
set -xthen running any terminal command likely is on the right path to doing this. (If you tryset -x, you can turn it off withset +x).set -ooptions are another I’m not very familiar with but might be related.set -xconfigures the running process, your shell. This is a posix standard flag. See https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/V3_chap02.htmlthere has to be a hook somewhere for every command that executes
Why do think this? I’m not aware of any shells that have such a feature. I’m not saying it couldn’t be done, but it would be a new feature.
I like the other suggestion of having a wrapper script that does what you need.
I don’t mind the idea of a wrapper it is just that most of the time, I’m looking at the last command, backspacing and then adding
--help. After thinking about it, I will likely go the wrapper route, but add arguments that use the last command in terminal history automatically so that typinghelp-with no args runs a--helpflag on that last command,2::5would add additional flags or arguments from the last command before--helpandhelp-with any other args calls those instead of using history.
You’d be intercepting all commands just to verify if they have a help flag and then if not executing them as they were intended. If the intercept got broke, then the shell would be completely broken.
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Not everything uses groff. A lot will have their own function or another.
Edit: I think for what you indicting you are wanting to try you’d need to either patch your shell of choice or write your own.
Edit2: If you did patch it, the best way I can think of to get something upstreamed would be to patch bash to use CTRL-Enter to automatically pipe the output to the default pager defined in BASHPAGER followed by PAGER if it doesn’t exist. Then set the BASHPAGER to your “bat” command.
Frankly, I would be surprised, if anything uses groff for displaying
--help, unless it shows the man page for that.
The most basic implementation of--helpis a manually formatted multi-line string written into the source code, which gets printed as-is.
For dynamic layouting, you do need more logic, but rendering it to groff source code first does not make that easier. For tabbing, you print an appropriate number of\t.I agree, I just didn’t want to make assumptions about how newer things work with localization these days.
At this point, someone has to have already made a prettier shell or terminal that is configured like this by default. Hideous 1950s monocolor --help output can’t be a novel issue in 2025.
16 Color terminals didn’t really start getting used until the 90s and early 2000s. And 256 after that. A lot of software was written back then and it would take a lot to add something that might not display well because of the terminal’s color scheme and now we have color theming.
I wonder if Busybox or similar rewrites contain standardization that could be leveraged.
To answer the original question, even though @RedWeasel@lemmy.world’s advice really is superior:
All commands that can be executed via your shell must live in your
$PATHor their subdirectories. You could enumerate all files in there, filter by being executable, and run them with the--helpargument.You can then filter these commands by their exit code. If
--helpis a recognized flag, the exit code should be0. Otherwise it should be something else. (Running every command blindly might be a bad idea though.)Or if you are lazy you could add “-h” as an option to said help command for when --help doesn’t work. Shouldn’t take to long to to make a list with a script that runs each command to with --help and logs it all to a file though. Then just go look for the ones that don’t like it in the log. Apparently bash has a builtin command named help, so a different name is probably better then.
ls -1 $dir | while read line do echo “----------” $line --help |& >> logfile.txt done
Just search in you favorite pager for “-----” and just hit “next” key.
There’s no particularly smart way to accomplish this in the exact way that you want. I don’t like the solution which searches your $PATH because now you’re adding latency to search your entire $PATH for every command to add this functionality. It’s a singularly better solution to tell the CLI what you want versus the CLI attempting (using logic) to figure it out.
The easiest solution here is to create your own command which calls the target application with
--help;#!/bin/bash $1 --help | bat --language=helpThen run it;
$ script_name dockerand it will run
docker --help | bat --language=help. If you use this solution a lot you can try to use bash function which you call at the end of commands if they error;helpfunc() { $1 --help | bat --language=help } trap 'helpfunc' ERRBut now you have to run logic to truncate previous commands to only return the first word of a command from history and it becomes a real PITA…
Long story short, if you want to hack your console experience like this, you’re looking for a functional shell scripting language, like Elvish shell and not bash.
Grep?
