Re: IOC shell usage messages

["Johnson, Andrew N. via Core-talk" <core-talk at aps.anl.gov>]

On Apr 24, 2020, at 10:52 PM, Michael Davidsaver via Core-talk <core-talk at aps.anl.gov> wrote:

I think this is so plainly and obviously useful that I've gone ahead
and pushed it to the 7.0 branch.

https://github.com/epics-base/epics-base/commit/ce4fb6085ffccd2ad0c29191d221c55341a485a6

Looks good.

Most of the built-in commands are actually described in the AppDevGuide reasonably well, although the commands are usually embedded in the chapters describing their associated subsystem, and we have probably added functionality to some commands without documenting it there. In most cases the wording there would probably have been too verbose for this, but the docs might describe features that could be mentioned in the help text.

And hey, who knew that "help" supported wildcard matching?

Anyone who has read the Release Notes for Base-3.14.7 (admittedly rather terse), or the AppDevGuide documentation chapter on iocsh perhaps? This is from chapter 18 of the 3.14 Guide; the wildcard feature was added in 2004:

help [command ...] Display synopsis of specified commands. Wild-card matching is applied so ‘help db*’ displays a synopsis of all commands beginning with the letters ‘db’. With no arguments display a list of all commands.

Thanks,

- Andrew

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