 I often hear from viewers of the channel that are trying to learn Linux, and especially that are trying to learn the command line and the various command line utilities that we have on Linux. So, you know, things like GRIP said and all call the various GNU Core Utils. And, you know, a lot of people say that it's a big learning curve. It's a steep learning curve and it's kind of complicated and they're absolutely right. I've got to be honest that a lot of times I actually have to Google answers for certain flags and options that are available on certain command line utilities that I don't use all the time. And part of the reason I have to do this and probably part of the reason many of you also have to do this is there is a real lack of consistency as far as flags and options on our various shell utilities. Let me switch over to my desktop and demonstrate this. So I'm going to go ahead and open a terminal here and zoom way in. I'll clear the screen here. Now, when we talk about a lack of consistency with flags and options, so we're talking about, you know, things like, you know, program dash v typically is how you would get the version number of a program. If you didn't want to run the program, you just wanted to know what version you're currently using for that program dash h is typically the help option. So those are two very common flags that work on a lot of shell utilities. For example, if I did Emacs space dash v, you can say I'm on Emacs 28.2. If I did Emacs space dash h, that is the help information. So it's just a list of some of the common flags for Emacs. And that typically works for many programs, but not all. I'll give you an example here. For example, I use the brave browser. If I did brave dash h for, you know, help information about the brave browser, it says no manual entry for brave. So brave doesn't even have a man page, much less, you know, the h flag. It has no man page, no flags and options at all. Apparently, or at least if it does, there is no documentation about it at all. Of course, brave is not a command line utility, but even a command line utility like cat, if I did cat dash h, first help information about cat because cat does have flags and options. There's a man page to it. But for whatever reason, the creators of cat did not use dash h for a help flag. You can see I could type dash dash help for help information. I do get that. Or actually, that's just the shell. I'm in the fish shell. I think the fish shell is just trying to help me out. Try cat dash dash help. Let's see if that actually does return some help information. So it does. But again, a lack of consistency. But what about a command like LS dash h for help? Well, that does nothing, right? LS dash h. All it does is the numbers here for the size of the file or directory. It changes them into human readable numbers. That's what LS dash h does. So again, how would I get the help information with LS dash dash help? Yeah, that works. And going back to the dash v flag, I showed you emax dash v. Gave me the version for emax. If I did neovm dash v, I can get the latest version of neovm is 0.9.1. But what if I did regular vm? Now, I've got my vm command alias. So I'm going to do command vm for the actual vm program. Because if I just type vm, it's actually going to run neovm. But command vm, and I did dash v, it just runs vm, right? There is no dash v flag. But if I did dash dash version, then I actually get the version information. Actually, I get a lot of information. Really, I don't know why it spits out all of this when I really just need that line there. So that is a huge output for that. But you can see, again, a real lack of consistency when it comes to programs and how they display the help information and the version information. And of course, that's the same with other flags other than just dash h and dash v. Many programs, for example, Grip, they have an i flag. The i flag is an insensitive case search or an ignore case, meaning if I search for the word Derrick spelled normally, it'll search for Derrick, even if it was spelled this way or all cabs or all lowercase, whatever it happens to be. It's an insensitive case search. And many shell programs have this same flag, dash i for ignore case. We don't care if it's capitalized or not capitalized. But then you have other programs, for example, said as a dash i flag that does not mean insensitive name search. It means in place, replace whatever if I did. For example, if I did inside single quotes here, s and then the old string that I'm searching for slash the new string that I want you to replace it with slash G for every instance of this globally replace that. And then I'd have to give it some file name or whatever. But that dash i flag has nothing to do with the search for old, which is the string we're searching for, right? In fact, said for said to do an insensitive case search, it's really weird what you'd have to do is behind the G, you add a capital I in the s slash old slash new slash G section of the command. So the capital I would be the insensitive case search, the dash i option or flag here. That would actually be the in place right to the file flag. It's just really weird. I can actually show you this. I'm not actually going to override a file. So let's get rid of the dash i. But let's do a case search for garrick spelled the right way. And when we find that, let's change that to bobby slash G. And then we're going to search my bash RC because my name does appear in the header of my bash RC. Let me up arrow and pipe that through head dash in five. Otherwise, we're going to get the entire output from my bash RC. I really just want the first five lines because my name appears on line two. And you can see we did the said substitution for Derrick. Derrick was here. Now we've replaced it with bobby. But what if I did a search for Derrick all caps? You can see it didn't replace anything. But if I tell it to ignore case, now, once again, we get the said substitution working. So there's a real lack of consistency with our show utilities, the flags and options, what they mean from various programs. And I know that causes me confusion because I'm always searching on Stack Overflow to remember what certain flags mean and certain programs dash v. We were talking about how dash i is not the same and said dash v is not the same in Grip. If I do a Grip dash v, that is an inverse search, meaning search for everything that is not the string, right? Search for every line that does not contain this string. It's just a real lack of consistency. And then, of course, you have a lack of consistency in that not every Grip is the same Grip. Not every said is the same said. Now, those of us using GNU slash Linux, we're all using the GNU versions of these programs. But what if you're a BSD user? What if you're a macOS user, right? Your version of said is the BSD said. The BSD said actually has absolutely no way to do it in sensitive name search, right? So that capital I thing I showed you, that works for GNU said, it doesn't work for BSD said at all. So for those of you that are new to the command line, to the shell and trying to learn all of these various shell utilities, I do share in your frustration that sometimes it's hard to remember these things. What I do is I just make notes. I have some org documents, or if you prefer Markdown or whatever it is that you like to work with, have a file. Have a file dedicated to some of the shell utilities that you work with on a somewhat regular basis, but maybe not a regular enough basis that you'll remember the flags. So I've got files on AUK. I've got files on said. I've got files on Grip that I can quickly look up because I've made notes in the past where I had to use a certain AUK command. But it's not something I would use on a regular basis. Maybe I only use it once or twice a year. It's like, I know I've used it before. Let me go back to my notes and look up that command. So that's how I handle this situation these days. One last thing I wanna mention is those of you that are actually writing software or Linux, especially command line utilities, please be mindful of what some of these flags and options traditionally stand for. So if you have a dash H flag, it should be the help flag. If you have a dash V flag, it should tell me what the version number of your program is. And if you have a dash I flag, if it does any kind of search, that should be an insensitive name search. That's what most people are gonna assume these kinds of flags are. So just be mindful of that. Now before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. Gabe James Maxim, a homies to bald mat, amendment Mitchell Paul, Royal West, armor, dragon, bash, potato chuck, commander, angry, George Lee, Marshawn, met those Nate, Erion, Paul, peace, archimdor, Polytech, reality, T's for less, Red Prophet, Roland, Tools Devler, Williams, and a bit. These guys, they're my high steered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This little rant about the lack of consistency with our command line programs, it wouldn't have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now, these are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work and want to see more videos about Linux and friends and open source software, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. Peace. And please, every piece of software needs a man page. Don't be lazy.