dotnet --help command

[TheRealPiotrP]

should support both --help and invalid input.

[ahsonkhan]

Here are the common usage scenarios that I see:

1. dotnet

2. dotnet -h

3. dotnet --help

4. dotnet -h|--help command
   [1-4] Show the help/usage for dotnet driver.

5. dotnet command -h|--help
   Try to run dotnet-command with -h (or --help) as argument, which presumable shows help for the specific command.

6. dotnet invalidCommand
   Try to run dotnet-invalidCommand and if the return code is non-zero, infer that the command does not exist (or usage failed), and show the help for the dotnet driver. I do not see any other way for the driver to know what commands are valid without having the dotnet-commands command be built in.

[brthor]

To sidestep needing to implement help on every command we can call man "dotnet-commandname" in scenario 5. This is the way git handles this same scenario.

[TheRealPiotrP]

This is great, @ahsonkhan !

@brthor , how does your proposal scale out to Windows?

@ahsonkhan, what is your implementation intention here? Will this be a small feature? I'd love to be able to get three implementations, one for each CLI lib listed in dotnet/cli#35 as well as https://github.com/docopt/docopt.net. We could then get your thoughts on which was easiest to work with and most linuxy. thoughts?

[brthor]

@piotrpMSFT For windows we will need a different strategy because we don't have manpages. Going with Git as an example again, they bring up an html page. This could work but we'd need to generate html in addition to nroff from the docs.json. There are tools like "man2html" which go from nroff to html, but they only seem to work on Linux.

Having done this research now, I think implementing --help in each command will be less work and potentially easier to maintain.

[ahsonkhan]

@piotrpMSFT I am using the DNX parser. I can try and use the other parsers and see which one was the easiest to use. However, how do I measure ease of use?

[knarfalingus]

Just wanted to ping this since I just experienced it on Ubuntu, I typed dotnet restor -s https://myget.org/f/dotnet-core (note the missing e) and got a stack trace (Unhandled Exception: System.ComponentModel.Win32Exception: No such file or directory), I feel it would be more helpful to show a message like "invalid command 'restor'" or similar and then display the help text as if --help had been specified.