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From: gandalf@russell.STANFORD.EDU (Juergen Wagner)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: globbing in the shell (Was Re: more rm insanity)
Message-ID: <889@russell.STANFORD.EDU>
Date: Thu, 3-Dec-87 00:33:22 EST
Article-I.D.: russell.889
Posted: Thu Dec  3 00:33:22 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 7-Dec-87 05:33:02 EST
References: <1257@boulder.Colorado.EDU> <6840002@hpcllmv.HP.COM>
Reply-To: gandalf@russell.Stanford.edu (Juergen Wagner)
Organization: Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford U.
Lines: 18

What you need may be something like the TOPS-20 style of interactive help
facility. For many commands you can just hit the '?' key to get some hint
on what is supposed to come next. This, however, requires some kind of 
interface to the program to be invoked. Encountering a line
	% foo -l frob
followed by typing a special character (e.g. '?') your shell could fork
	"foo -help -l frob"
or something similar. This requires a convention on how to request this
piece of help information from the program. Another way (much simpler)
is to do it in Macintosh-style: for each program keep a (canned text) help
file around in a special subdirectory, which is typed out when the help
char is encountered.

I reckon, either of these facilities is not too difficult to built into 
existing shells.

Juergen Wagner,		                gandalf@Russell.stanford.edu
Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI), Stanford CA