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What is a good way to output help text for a bash script to get the columns lines to be lined up properly?
something like:
Usage: mycommand [options]
-h| --help this is some help text.
this is more help text.
-1|--first-option this is my first option
-2|--second-option this is my second option
346
There are multiple ways to show script usage inside of your Bash script. One way is to check if the user has supplied the -h or --help options as arguments as seen below. #!/bin/bash # check whether user had supplied -h or --help .
The operator "%" will try to remove the shortest text matching the pattern, while "%%" tries to do it with the longest text matching. Follow this answer to receive notifications.
From Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide: $$ is the process ID (PID) of the script itself. $BASHPID is the process ID of the current instance of Bash.
To format date in YYYY-MM-DD format, use the command date +%F or printf "%(%F)T\n" $EPOCHSECONDS . The %F option is an alias for %Y-%m-%d . This format is the ISO 8601 format.
I like to use cat for this:
usage.sh:
#!/bin/bash
cat <<EOF
Usage: $0 [options]
-h| --help this is some help text.
this is more help text.
-1|--first-option this is my first option
-2|--second-option this is my second option
EOF
This will output:
Usage: usage.sh [options]
-h| --help this is some help text.
this is more help text.
-1|--first-option this is my first option
-2|--second-option this is my second option
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