Very interesting idea. I’ve gotten into the habit of using something like /^-o to search for short flags.
/-o\>
Seems to work, albeit you'll hit later mentions doing it more than once, but yeah word boundary searches are awesome.
Agree with your overall suggestion, just a tip for when the man page doesnt cooperate.
I believe you but in the spirit of regex, can you explain?
I guess hyphen is literal outside of square brackets. But then you’re escaping an angle bracket?
Also curious what trouble OP was having. Wouldn’t a trailing space be enough?
‘/-o ‘
It depends on how the document is written, but \> stops matching on a period, comma, apostrophe, space, newline, what have you. Word boundary matching is just very handy.
As to why its that set of characters.... Honestly I have no idea :) Regexes are just what they are and I assume the special escape made sense to the inventor at least.
The problem is that /-o will also match something like --my-irrelevant-option.
Word boundaries match the end (or the beginning) of the word.
How exactly to do it depends on the regex library, my less is built with PCRE2 therefore I can do /-o\b.
Also curious what trouble OP was having. Wouldn’t a trailing space be enough?
Dealing with multiple more complex tools the last few days, looking the short option up, because i needed to know what it does, was about a hundred steps through walls of text. Then came the yay and curl manpages; one or two steps. That's when i wrote the post.
I feel like this should go to some of the programming communities also, but I’m not a programmer so I don’t know where
I've been using more https://cheat.sh/ or --help on specific commands and subcommands.
It's usually less noise than in a man page, and no need to install a specific man page for each command you want.
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