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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Is there an easy way to filter all terminal commands that contain a --help flag? (lemmy.world)

submitted 6 days ago by j4k3@lemmy.world to c/linux@lemmy.ml

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Or is there maybe a way to set the pager for all help related queries to some command? I'm using bat and would like to pipe all --help through | bat --language=help by default for the syntax highlighting and colored output... Or if you know a lower effort way to color the output of --help let me know.

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[–] bleistift2@sopuli.xyz 9 points 6 days ago (1 children)

To answer the original question, even though @RedWeasel@lemmy.world’s advice really is superior:

All commands that can be executed via your shell must live in your $PATH or their subdirectories. You could enumerate all files in there, filter by being executable, and run them with the --help argument.

You can then filter these commands by their exit code. If --help is a recognized flag, the exit code should be 0. Otherwise it should be something else. (Running every command blindly might be a bad idea though.)

[–] RedWeasel@lemmy.world 4 points 6 days ago

Or if you are lazy you could add "-h" as an option to said help command for when --help doesn't work. Shouldn't take to long to to make a list with a script that runs each command to with --help and logs it all to a file though. Then just go look for the ones that don't like it in the log. Apparently bash has a builtin command named help, so a different name is probably better then.

ls -1 $dir | while read line do echo "----------" $line --help |& >> logfile.txt done

Just search in you favorite pager for "-----" and just hit "next" key.