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Don't print long usage messages on a command-line error.

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In the course of debugging the command-line argument refactoring in
previous commits, I found I wasn't quite sure whether PSCP thought I'd
given it too many arguments, or too few, because it didn't print an
error message saying which: it just printed its giant usage message.

Over the last few years I've come to the belief that this is Just
Wrong anyway. Printing the whole of a giant help message should only
be done when the user asked for it: otherwise, print a short and
to-the-point error, and maybe _suggest_ how to get help, but scrolling
everything else off the user's screen is not a good response to a
typo. I wrote this thought up more fully last year:

https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/quasiblog/stop-helping/

So, time to practise what I preach! The PuTTY tools now follow the
'Stop helping!' principle. You can get full help by saying --help.

Also, when we do print the help, we now exit(0) rather than exit(1),
because there's no reason to report failure: we successfully did what
the user asked us for.
This commit is contained in:
Simon Tatham
2024-09-25 16:17:07 +01:00
parent 74150633f1
commit ecfa6b2734
6 changed files with 17 additions and 12 deletions
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7
windows/plink.c
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@ -189,7 +189,6 @@ static void usage(void)
printf(" control what happens when a log file already exists\n");
printf(" -shareexists\n");
printf(" test whether a connection-sharing upstream exists\n");
exit(1);
}
static void version(void)
@ -350,6 +349,7 @@ int main(int argc, char **argv)
version();
} else if (!strcmp(p, "--help")) {
usage();
exit(0);
} else if (!strcmp(p, "-pgpfp")) {
pgp_fingerprints();
exit(1);
@ -395,7 +395,10 @@ int main(int argc, char **argv)
return 1;
if (!cmdline_host_ok(conf)) {
usage();
fprintf(stderr, "plink: no valid host name provided\n"
"try \"plink --help\" for help\n");
cmdline_arg_list_free(arglist);
return 1;
}
prepare_session(conf);