rshell --help isn't very helpful

[fake-name]

Effectively the title. The help output of rshell doesn't actually list the commands that rshell supports, making it less then helpful.

durr@tinybox ~/P/E/workSpace (master)> rshell --help
usage: rshell [options] [command]

Remote Shell for a MicroPython board.

positional arguments:
  cmd                   Optional command to execute

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -b BAUD, --baud BAUD  Set the baudrate used (default = 115200)
  --buffer-size BUFFER_SIZE
                        Set the buffer size used for transfers (default = 512 for USB, 32 for UART)
  -p PORT, --port PORT  Set the serial port to use (default 'None')
  --rts RTS             Set the RTS state (default '')
  --dtr DTR             Set the DTR state (default '')
  -u USER, --user USER  Set username to use (default 'micro')
  -w PASSWORD, --password PASSWORD
                        Set password to use (default 'python')
  -e EDITOR, --editor EDITOR
                        Set the editor to use (default 'vi')
  -f FILENAME, --file FILENAME
                        Specifies a file of commands to process.
  -d, --debug           Enable debug features
  -n, --nocolor         Turn off colorized output
  -l, --list            Display serial ports
  -a, --ascii           ASCII encode binary files for transfer
  --wait WAIT           Seconds to wait for serial port
  --timing              Print timing information about each command
  -V, --version         Reports the version and exits.
  --quiet               Turns off some output (useful for testing)

You can specify the default serial port using the RSHELL_PORT environment variable.

So from the above, cmd seems to be the placeholder for *things* that make rshell do stuff. What are the commands supported? Who knows!

This isn't even a case of "well, it's actually documented in the man pages", since those don't seem to exist. (believe me, that's another argument since some platforms remove the man pages for space reasons).

durr@tinybox ~/P/E/workSpace (master)> man rshell
No manual entry for rshell

Entering the rshell cli (why do I need a CLI in my CLI?), apparently you can type help (hmmm, maybe that's one of the commands?), and get something useful:

/home/durr/Programming/ESPScreen/workSpace> help
Executing "help"

Documented commands (type help <topic>):
========================================
args    cat  connect  date  edit  filesize  help  mkdir  rm     shell
boards  cd   cp       echo  exit  filetype  ls    repl   rsync

Is there a reason that's not output when rshell --help is invoked? Instead of

positional arguments:
  cmd                   Optional command to execute

also, apparently rshell help is different then rshell --help. Wat.

Apologies for the snark, I'm very tired at the moment.

[misan]

also, apparently rshell help is different then rshell --help. Wat.

The former is a command and the latter is an option, as in

usage: rshell [options] [command]

[davehylands]

rhsell --help shows the command line options available when invoking rshell (and using --help is the standard way that most command line tools do this).

When you invoke rshell you can also pass commands to be executed and help is one of those commands. If you start rshell and then issue the help command it shows the available commands from within rshell and this is what happens when you run rshell help. You could also run rshell ls . to get a listing of files in the current directory.

It doesn't make sense for rshell help to show all of the command line options that show up in --help since none of those are applicable once you've started rshell. It might make sense for rshell --help to also include the output of the help command.