From: Stephen Hemminger
> Sent: 08 August 2016 16:57
> To: Jiri Pirko
...
> > >> In order to not confuse reader, write help messages into stderr.
> > >>
> > >> Signed-off-by: Jiri Pirko <j...@mellanox.com>
> > >
> > >This does make devlink consistent with other parts of iproute2.
> > >But the most common coding standards, back to Unix, and GNU are
> > >that help messages should go to stdout so that:
> > > $ ip -h | more
> > >would work as expected.
> >
> > The thing is I wanted to make stdout only for json. Putting non-json
> > help out there does not look correct to me. Is it?
> >
>
> I applied both of these patches, just wanted to mention that iproute2 is not
> following the GNU convention. At this point, it really doesn't matter, there
> are arguments to be made for both behaviors.
If you output help in response to an invalid option (eg) 'ip -?' then you
need to write it to stderr since it is part of the error message.
OTOH if help is explicitly requested 'ip -h' then stdout would be ok.
Nothing wrong with typing 'ip -h 2>&1 | pg' though.
David
