CyberSoft FAQ Answers
Help With the VFind™ Security Toolkit
Q:
Executing VFind™ with the .h option causes the output to continuously scroll off the screen. How can I execute this statement so that the output is in a more readable format?
A:
Both UAD and VFind™ write their help output to stderr, not stdout. It was originally implemented this way so the help wouldn't get lost if accidently used in a pipeline, e.g. uad -h ... | vfind. Recent versions of UAD and VFind™ have more and more options, and recently we made sure that the -h option listed all of them, so now the help output is quite long.
Certainly, usage error messages should be written to stderr, this is a UNIX tradition. And some programs only print help on usage if you specify a bad command-line option. I checked a few other programs, GNU make, Perl, and elm -h write to stdout, pgp5 -h writes to stderr. I think that writing to stdout may be best in this case.
Anyway, it is easy enough to pipe stderr to more or less, in csh:
and in sh:
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