Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by downerending 2219 days ago
On the one hand, I recall that fondly. On the other hand, a modern Linux box might have thousands of commands, and I'm not sure that VMS HELP could handle that well.
1 comments

It sounds almost exactly like the unix (1)man command actually, and, well:

  $ ls /usr/share/man/man1/ | wc -l
  2997
I'd say that qualifies as thousands (plural).
The difference, as I recall it (and it's been decades), is that VMS HELP tries to display all of the commands in a curses-like screen. That kind of works for a few hundred commands, but not thereafter.

Unix has things like 'man -k', but those ultimately output into a pager, which is well-designed to deal with quite long lists.

I do miss HELP and EDT, but they're hopelessly outmatched by modern tools.

> VMS HELP tries to display all of the commands in a curses-like screen. That kind of works for a few hundred commands, but not thereafter.

Ah, yes, point. I was more pointing out that it's possible to "handle that well" (or at least not terribly; unix is like democracy), rather than any disagreement over how well HELP itself handled it in practice.