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For a small flight of fancy, imagine if each program had a --for-docs argument, which causes it to simply spit out the canonical long-form version equivalent to whatever else it has been called with.




Or, a separate program that can convert from short to long form:

> for-docs "ls -lrth /mnt/data"

ls -l --reverse -t --human-readable -- /mnt/data

(I'd put in an option to put the options alphabetically too)


While I'd appreciate that facility too, it seems... even-more-fanciful, as one tool would need to somehow incorporate all the logic and quirks of all supported commands, including ones which could be very destructive if anything went wrong.

Kind of like positing a master `dry-run` command as opposed to different commands implementing `--dry-run` arguments.


I did muck around with using "sed" to process the "man" output to find a relevant long option in a one-liner, so it wouldn't be too difficult to implement.

I did something like this:

  _command="sed" _option="n"
  man -- "${_command}" | sed --quiet --expression  "s/^       -${_option}.*, //p"
Then I realised that a bit of logic is needed (or more complicated regexp) to deal with some exceptions and moved onto something else.



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