More Gnu Smugness: Give me help when I want it

Following on from the ‘head -n’ debacle, here’s another annoying gnuism:

$ egrep -h
Usage: egrep [OPTION]... PATTERN [FILE]...
Try `egrep --help' for more information.

So I’ve asked it for help, it knows I’ve asked it for help, but it insists that I do things its way. The utility has even sequestered the ‘-h’ option to give me this useless message. It would have been much better to call the usage option whether I gave it ‘-h’ or ‘–help’.

Computers should do what I want, when I want it. In fact, someday soon I want a computer with a DO MY STUFF NOW, LOWLY COMPUTER key, that issues an NMI to make the computer return to what I want it to do. I think that’s what the Esc key was originally for, but all too often, the operating system thinks it has more important things to do than I have.