victor-gp
Wrong order of `stdout` and `stderr` in `file --help`
description
file \--help 2>&1 | bat -pl help gives:
-M LIST use LIST as a colon-separated list of magic
number files in place of default
-d use default magic file
-i do not further classify regular files
Usage: file [OPTION...] [FILE...]
Determine type of FILEs.
--help display this help and exit
-v, --version output version information and exit
-m, --magic-file LIST use LIST as a colon-separated list of magic
number files
...
Because file writes some part of its help message to stderr and it goes first in the resulting text. Without 2>&1 everything is right:
file \--help | bat -pl help:
Usage: file [OPTION...] [FILE...]
Determine type of FILEs.
--help display this help and exit
-v, --version output version information and exit
-m, --magic-file LIST use LIST as a colon-separated list of magic
number files
...
I think it's quite rare for most tools to write help to stderr, but I guess it's worth mentioning.
$ bat --version
bat 0.25.0
$ COMMAND --help
file \--help 2>&1 | bat -pl help
$ COMMAND --version
file-5.41; magic file from /usr/share/file/magic
Hi @rusmux, thank you for reporting this!
Does it change anything if you do file \--help 1>&2 | bat -pl help ?
(I wouldn't expect it to, because I've read the redirect handles stdout & stderr concurrently, not as a concatenation. But still.)
If it's a concurrency issue, then the only way to fix this lies on the command's end. I don't think we're able to improve the situation here.
As a matter of fact, I can't reproduce this with a latter version of the command, file-5.45[^1]. That one prints a large error message and that's the end of the story.
For context, we recommend using that redirect because, while writing tests for this, I found that some commands write their help message to stderr, not stdout. So it makes sense to capture both before piping to bat + cmd-help.
For this case only, you may try skipping the redirection (you'll lose half the msg though, and I don't know which half 😅). Or forego bat + cmd-help entirely.
Is this "resolution" satisfactory enough for you?
[^1]: magic file from /etc/magic:/usr/share/misc/magic, on Ubuntu 24.04.
FWIW, I can't reproduce it on a Docker container of Ubuntu 22.04 either... (file-5.41 like yours)
It prints the entire message, in the intended order, and without any ellipses.
Are you maybe on a BSD system?
In any case, is file the only command that gives this issue or are there others?
If it's the latter, I may want to look into improving our handling of this case (zero idea how though!)