[GROOVY-6027] groovy -h could be more clear

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Trivial
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 2.5.0-alpha-1
• Component/s: command line processing
• Assignee: Paul King
• Reporter: Andrew Eisenberg
• Created: 26/Feb/13 16:32
• Updated: 02/May/17 02:03
• Resolved: 08/Jun/15 08:28

Description

Currently, groovy -h prints this:

$ groovy -h
usage: groovy [options] [args]
options:
  -a,--autosplit <splitPattern>    split lines using splitPattern (default '\s')
                                   using implicit 'split' variable
  -c,--encoding <charset>          specify the encoding of the files
  -classpath <path>                Specify where to find the class files - must
                                   be first argument
  -cp,--classpath <path>           Aliases for '-classpath'
  -D,--define <name=value>         define a system property
  -d,--debug                       debug mode will print out full stack traces
     --disableopt <optlist>        disables one or all optimization elements.
                                   optlist can be a comma separated list with
                                   the elements: all (disables all
                                   optimizations), int (disable any int based
                                   optimizations)
  -e <script>                      specify a command line script
  -h,--help                        usage information
  -i <extension>                   modify files in place; create backup if
                                   extension is given (e.g. '.bak')
     --indy                        enables compilation using invokedynamic
  -l <port>                        listen on a port and process inbound lines
                                   (default: 1960)
  -n                               process files line by line using implicit
                                   'line' variable
  -p                               process files line by line and print result
                                   (see also -n)
  -v,--version                     display the Groovy and JVM versions

Typically, under the usage line there is a one sentence description of what the command does (see commands like svn --help and tar --help.

Second, you could change usage: groovy [options] [args] to usage: groovy [options] [filename].