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`man-get-flags`

Parses man page files for command line flags

Description

Sometimes you might want to programmatically search man pages for any supported flag. Particularly if you’re writing a dynamic autocompletion. man-get-flags does this and returns a JSON document.

You can either pipe a man page to man-get-flags, or pass the name of the command as a parameter.

man-get-flags returns a JSON document. Either an array or an object, depending on what flags (if any) are passed.

If no flags are passed, man-get-flags will default to just parsing the man page for anything that looks like a flag (ie no descriptions or other detail).

Usage

<stdin> -> man-get-flags [--descriptions] -> <stdout>

man-get-flags command [--descriptions] -> <stdout>

Examples

» man-get-flags --descriptions find -> [{$.key =~ 'regex'}]
{
    "-iregex": "eg: pattern -- Like -regex, but the match is case insensitive.",
    "-regex": "eg: pattern -- True if the whole path of the file matches pattern using regular expression.  To match a file named “./foo/xyzzy”, you can use the regular expression “.*/[xyz]*” or “.*/foo/.*”, but not “xyzzy” or “/foo/”."
}

Flags

--descriptions return a map of flags with their described usage
-d shorthand for --descriptions

Detail

Limitations

Due to the freeform nature of man pages - that they’re intended to be human readable rather than machine readable - and the flexibility that developers have to parse command line parameters however they wish, there will always be a margin for error with how reliably any parser can autodetect parameters. one requirement is that flags are hyphen prefixed, eg --flag.

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