malevolent dictator for life
Not a Spring Onion
⍼
Squid! 
@astrid the correct answer is to just try all of them in decreasing order of likelihood
GD2
Styx@astrid invalid command is chaotic evil, and I sometimes does it when I arrow up my previous command with a bung of thing that didn't completely worked, add some definitely breaking things, for the sake of not erasing or retyping the original command name
Also my default is --help even if I thank every time the devs when -h is reserved for help for those edge cases where you can't be sure if -h is innocuous or not, and the command does a lot of things
Haelwenn /элвэн/ 
@astrid And the ultimate fallback:
grep /usr/src
Slash909uk@astrid "as the program <insert cmd here> explain how your command line works" (copilot) 😁🤘🔥
grob (teeth era) 🇺🇦🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️
GunChleocGunChleoc (@[email protected])
Attached: 1 image @[email protected] Windows 98 already automated this very useful function (translation is in the image description)
Refurio AnachroWeb search for docs.
Click through their https://vc-honeypot, wiki, ...
Download sources to look for man pages.
Guess option names.
Look at strings .
Look at strings .
Read the source.
Plead for help on Stackoverflow, Social Media, Google Groups...
Ask a colleague to finish your job.
Give up on comp engineering.
edd@astrid The best is when you do `xxx -h` and all you get back is "What the frell was that? If you need help, pass in --help!"
You know I need help you numpty, stop being an ass about it.
Tracy 🏳️⚧️@astrid Get-Help <command>
いもいも@astrid 我选择 tldr
Saphire Lattice@astrid Thanks I hate this! Fuck, I am sharing it everywhere <3
Amin Girasol
Sasha Göbbels 🐿️@astrid And there's .help in the SQLite cli tool 🫠
Mateusz 🏳️🌈@astrid This is why GUI apps are superior over CLI. They explicitly list the options they have in some form of a menu.
-> @@aemstuz @astrid GUI apps don't always do this, and even then there's like 8 different design conventions and over a dozen toolkits to get used to (at least on Windows and Linux, I believe macOS is slightly more consistent in this), all of which handle tiny things just ever so slightly differently. I'm not saying CLI apps are any better in this regard, but I am saying that this isn't a problem limited to them.
@aemstuz @astrid CLI apps can show you their features in a help menu, or better yet with shell compositions! They can absolutely show quite rich information right from the terminal as you're typing.
Not all at once, but neither can GUI apps, have you seen how many functions something like Microsoft PowerPoint has? Their ribbon is a great way to hide all that complexity and show only the stuff that is most relevant, but it's extremely difficult to get right, and something like Sibelius with similar complexity fails miserably (see also: Tantacrul video essay).
That also doesn't consider the fact that most GUI apps just don't bother showing all functionality. It's a weird argument, in my opinion, that they can show all functions, given that GUI apps literally don't do this, nor is it true that they can do it (at least in any easy way).
myrmepropagandisthalp should be the universal sign of distress IMO. The one who says "halp" needs it most.
Riley S. Faelan@futurebird By a strange coincidence, the Swedish spelling of 'help' is hjälp.
⛧TJC⛧
Resuna@astrid Also "the documentation is this file on my discord but the bot on this channel is more up-to-date".
Genders: ♾️, 🟪⬛🟩; Soni L.@astrid might we introduce you to: Typed Main, and the shitty native/non-wasm equivalent Protobuf Main?
you want help? pass in a core.HelpType-typed object.
☃️karolherbst☃️@astrid the modern solution to this problem is obviously to have an AI knowing how to invoke help for a certain tool and....
👽🐦🦇🐉💻@astrid why isn't man like the defacto standard.
i mean sure have those other options if you want to but you should always have a man page.
@astrid and we should also have the 'man' program have aliases for the other genders as well.
Efertone 
Claire@astrid And then you get it wrong and it executes the program instead of displaying the help page
Rastal@astrid man. Always read the man page first!
KevinOfComputer@astrid and Get-Help <command>
Bruce Heerssen 
@astrid
I need a halp utility in my life.
I need a halp utility in my life.
Plaid@astrid @SwiftOnSecurity plz add “ask on Reddit without trying any of the above”
ParzivalWolfram@astrid if it's not --help (-help is barely acceptible as a substitute for anything that isn't java, as it may wind up being treated as a one-char switch clump) and there's no man pages i'm a fan of throwing the offending program in the trash. (note that on Windows/DOS/etc, /? is usually standard, and /help becomes the non-standard fallback that may wind up interpreted as a clump of one-char switches.)
Gasper Zejn@astrid v2 and psql still not covered 😂
gyptazy