Re: [Usability]startup parameters

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Sun, Apr 06, 2003 at 05:04:24PM +0200, Benjamin Otte wrote: 
> So what is "the right way" in this case?
> I myself prefer exiting on any possible parsing errors, becuase a wrong
> option obviously is a user error that should be corrected. Not correcting
> it might make the program behave unexpected for the user, since he
> supplied options that don't work as he expects them to.

I'd say it's correct to exit with an informative message, generally
speaking. Otherwise if you have a typo or something you'll never know.
Also this is the standard UNIX behavior:

$ ls --blah
ls: unrecognized option `--blah'
Try `ls --help' for more information.
$

"echo" is a special case, the Single UNIX Specification specifies
funky behavior for echo.

Havoc