Exiting with error code 2 when help argument passed

[fredrb]

> exa --help
...
> echo $?
2
> exa --version
...
> echo $?
3

Shouldn't it be 0 for both, like ls?

I understand how help and version are treated as errors so they can have an early return. But the error code is explicitly set here:

    /// The OS return code this misfire should signify.
    pub fn error_code(&self) -> i32 {
        if let Misfire::Help(_) = *self { 2 }
                                   else { 3 }
    }

[ogham]

That function only actually exists so --help gets its own error code!

I don't know, it felt right to me to treat things like --help and --version as their own categories, separate from both success and failure. Success means that exa has listed some files, failure meant that an error occurred meaning it crashed or couldn't list files, but help? There's no error, so it's not 1, but it didn't list any files either, so it's not 0.

I can see the argument in favour of returning 0 here, because it was able to display the help correctly... but would anyone really use --help or --version in a script? Is there a use case that I'm not seeing?

[fredrb]

I don't see any real script that would depend on --help. I know this looks like a nitpick to you. But for instance piping exa --help with something else would break, like: exa --help | grep git. Help text will not be piped to grep because the command failed from shell's point of view.

[ogham]

I tried running that command in my shell and it still worked (though --help does go to stderr). But I can see that sort of thing happening. Also, I can’t find any other examples of other programs using different exit codes for --help and --version! So I’m going to change it.