Howard Chu @ Symas on Nostr: it used to be that all unix tools would print a "usage: foo [-option]" synopsis on ...

it used to be that all unix tools would print a "usage: foo [-option]" synopsis on stderr whenever invoked with an unrecognized option. So you never needed to memorize all the options anyway. My usual practice was to start with "{command} -," to get the usage msg whenever I needed a reminder.

But somewhere along the line, practice changed to just spitting out the unhelpful "unrecognized option -," message. Might've been MS-DOS influence, not sure. Major regression in usability.