--exclude option excludes input files about lychee HOT 5 CLOSED

Sounds reasonable. #119 😄

from lychee.

We don't do anything fancy with --exclude; it's just a normal structopt field:

So I'd say that's kind of the convention in structopt when you have a field that uses Vec<_> as a type.
At least according to the POSIX standard it seems to be standard behavior:

See Guideline 10 here:

The first -- argument that is not an option-argument should be accepted as a delimiter indicating the end of options. Any following arguments should be treated as operands, even if they begin with the '-' character.

I agree that it can be counterintuitive. We can debate if we want to change it if there is a way so that structopt only takes a single argument after --exclude. I doubt that this is possible, though and there might be good reasons for it. 😉

from lychee.

Yes as said, it's not a bug, just a syntax that is probably rarely enough used so that inexperienced users and as well higher experienced developers like me sometimes run into 😅.

Mostly I know this from X server calls and similar, where you want to pass multiple parameters to the client/child layer, followed by parameters to the server/parent layer, which then need to be delimited by --, but indeed for multiple arguments to single options, when it's not such a multi-layer thing, at least me can't remember another case, currently.

Probably it's enough to add a line about this to readme + help output, which could be even written a way that makes clear that it is expected common syntax, so everyone who reads it get's used to it 😄:

Multiple arguments are allowed for this option, remember to use "--" to separate the list of exclusions from the list of inputs.

from lychee.

We have the same behavior for includes and headers. Would you add that note to all of these parameters in that case, add it to the lychee help output as a general note below all options, or just to the README.md?

from lychee.

Oh, I didn't think about that. To be effective, it would make sense in the usage/--help output of the binary itself, but not in full length below each option that supports multiple arguments.

Btw, I see now that it's already part of the usage info:

lychee [FLAGS] [OPTIONS] [--] [inputs]...

Maybe it's really just me who run into this, even overseeing this usage reminder. If at all, probably an additional sentence for the ARGS: <inputs>... block would do, like:

Prefix with "--" to separate inputs from options that allow multiple arguments.

from lychee.