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Allow help to exit with status other than 1 #80

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chuckwondo opened this issue Apr 22, 2021 · 3 comments · May be fixed by #213
Open

Allow help to exit with status other than 1 #80

chuckwondo opened this issue Apr 22, 2021 · 3 comments · May be fixed by #213

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@chuckwondo
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I would like to be able to exit with status 0 when specifying -h or --help, but it appears that 1 is hard-coded as the exit status. Perhaps providing a means for specifying a different exit status when help is invoked would be nice.
@cspotcode
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Are there any workaround until this is added to cmd-ts? Catching and detecting the help error and changing process.exitCode or something?

Also, I'm curious, why was it implemented this way? I've done some testing, and most CLIs exit with code 0 when you run --help.

Here are a few commands I tested, all exit with code 0:

kubectl --help
helm --help
cp --help
ls --help
cat --help
node --help

@uncenter
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Looks like this is the line that needs to be changed:

cmd-ts/src/circuitbreaker.ts

Line 35 in e675907

throw new Exit({ exitCode: 1, message, into: 'stdout' });

You can see that -h, --help exits with code 1 while -v, --version exits with code 0:

cmd-ts/src/circuitbreaker.ts

Lines 33 to 39 in e675907

if (breaker.value === 'help') {
const message = value.printHelp(context);
throw new Exit({ exitCode: 1, message, into: 'stdout' });
} else if (breaker.value === 'version') {
const message = value.version || '0.0.0';
throw new Exit({ exitCode: 0, message, into: 'stdout' });
}

@uncenter uncenter linked a pull request Sep 11, 2023 that will close this issue
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@lgarron
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lgarron commented Nov 7, 2024

I think this is an important detail. I believe the most useful and most common convention is:

  • If the provided arguments are invalid, the program prints the help and exits with a non-zero exit code.
  • If --help is explicitly passed, the program prints the help and exits with code 0.

This is particularly useful for testing that a program is installed correctly, for example to test in a Homebrew formula.

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fix: exit --help with code 0 uncenter/cmd-ts
4 participants
@lgarron @cspotcode @chuckwondo @uncenter