Re: Default behaviour of 'ifconfig'

[David Young <dyoung%pobox.com@localhost>]

On Fri, Dec 03, 2010 at 04:45:57PM +0300, Aleksej Saushev wrote:
>   Hello!
> 
> Ignatios Souvatzis <is%netbsd.org@localhost> writes:
> 
> > On Fri, Dec 03, 2010 at 10:01:50AM +0100, Marc Balmer wrote:
> >> A cursory check on the Unix systems I run, including some Linux boxen,
> >> revealed that all of them but NetBSD have 'ifconfig', when called
> >> without arguments, default to the behaviour of 'ifconfig -a', which
> >> seems both natural and handy to me.
> >
> > Solaris ifconfig shows the usage help.
> 
> Im my opinion we shouldn't consider such notorious examples of usability
> as Solaris, unless you give it as an example for what it shouldn't be like.
> 
> To show the usage help we support "?" flag consistently throughout the
> whole userland. Well, some especially archaic tools don't utilise getopt(3),
> but we can change it (except for "dd" and, perhaps, some other weird cases).

The "?" flag is not a model of usability itself: it does not work
consistently across shells unless you backslash-escape it.

csh: {1} ifconfig -?
ifconfig: No match.

tcsh:~> ifconfig -?
ifconfig: No match.

sh$ ifconfig -?
ifconfig: unknown option -- ?
usage: ifconfig [-h] [-m] [-v] [-z] [-L] interface ...

Dave

-- 
David Young             OJC Technologies
dyoung%ojctech.com@localhost      Urbana, IL * (217) 278-3933