With a little --help from my friends

Working with the command line

I have been a developer for quite a few years now, and I have been using Linux for most of the time. Being a Linux user I am not afraid of using the command line, in fact, a lot of the time is spent using the terminal. Over the years I’ve spent a lot of time in the terminal, and there’s still a lot of things I don’t remember by heart.

We need to be able to use a lot of command line tools as developers, like coreutils for basic handling of files and other functionalty. Build systems for the JVM like maven, sbt or frontend adjecent tooling like npm, nodejs, deno.

Finding documentation

The documentation for these tools are often built-in. Most CLI (Command Line Interface) tools have a lot of options like for instance curl. Most tools also have a -h or --help option.

A lof of modern tools also have a subcommand structure, each of these may have a --help option, but many of them also have an own help subcommand.

Tools that are packaged by linux distributions also usually have man pages or info. These are pager searchable documentation pages which are directly available in the shell.

try it out:

man bash or man curl

The beautiful thing about shell based help functions is that it is available right where we are, no need to context shift to an online help guide.

As I wrote in a previous post, about shell completions, the need for remembering every option is not really needed. However, sometimes that is not sufficient, so docs are still needed.

Conclusion

Do not be afraid of asking the command about --help. It wants you to succeed.