Philosophical wishlist.

[Kjetil Halvorsen]

 All the GNU coreutils commands should accept a new flag:
 --example

 Which should print a (half) screenfull of instructive examples,
 functioning as a reminder.

 This idea is taken from the project Gnu R (www.r-project.org).
 R has a command example, which is invoked as
 example(fun)

 and then runs the examples from the help-page of fun.

 Extremely usefull!

Kjetil Brinchmann Halvorsen

[Karl Berry]

Hi Kjetil,

     All the GNU coreutils commands should accept a new flag:
     --example

I fully agree with you about the importance of showing examples.
However, I don't think a new option common to all programs is the thing
to do -- the overhead involved is unbelievable.

Instead, I think programs should add the info to their --help messages.
That also has the benefits of (a) not forcing users to hear about a new
option, and (b) allowing easy re-use of the examples in man pages
generated by help2man, as they are in coreutils.

So my suggestion is to write to bug-coreutils (or wherever else).
My guess is the answer will be "patches are welcome" :).

Meanwhile, I'll put something about it in the coding standards, so
maintainers might at least be more likely to think about it.

Thanks,
Karl