What should Python apps do when asked to show help?

[Steven D'Aprano]

I have an application written in Python which accepts -h or --help to show
help. I can:

(1) print the help text to stdout;

(2) run the help text through a pager;

(3) do something else?


Many command line tools simply output help to stdout (or stderr, if they're
evil), which makes it easy to redirect the help to a file, pass it to grep,
etc. For example:

[steve at ando ~]$ wget --help | wc -l
136

Other tools automatically launch a pager, e.g. man. (Admittedly, man --help
does not use a pager.) The Python help system, pydoc, does the same.

I was thinking that my application could use pydoc:

def do_help():
    import pydoc
    pydoc.pager(HELPTEXT)

or just print the help text:

def do_help():
    # Do I really need to show this???
    print(HELPTEXT)


but I was thinking of doing both: give my application a subcommand or an
option to display help directly in a pager, while -h and --help print to
stdout as normal.

What do you think? Too clever?



-- 
Steven