Support | clop

What clop reads

clop only knows two ways to obtain help text, plus one way to detect a version:

It does	How
Run `program --help`	when you name a `PROGRAM` on the command line
Read help text from a file	`clop -f FILE`
Read help text from standard input	`clop -` (e.g. `prog --help \\| clop -`)
Detect the version via `program --version`	automatically, when you name a `PROGRAM`

That is the whole list of what is supported by clop. If a program prints one option per line, i.e., the layout used by GNU coreutils, BusyBox, and Toybox, then clop counts it well.

What clop does not support (yet)

clop is deliberately small, so several common "give me help" conventions are not attempted:

-h: clop always invokes --help, never the short -h. If a program only responds to -h, you can still capture it yourself in this way: prog -h > help.txt; clop -f help.txt.
--usage / --help all / help subcommands, e.g. git help, go help, --help-all. clop does not support these yet. So, capture and pipe instead: git help -a | clop -.
man pages: clop does not run man, and man-page formatting is not the one parsed.
info pages: not supported, so treat them the same as man pages above.
Subcommand help: clop reads the top-level --help only. For a subcommand, capture it first: git commit --help | clop --name git-commit -.
Multi-line / wrapped option entries: options whose name does not begin a line with a dash (heavily indented or table-style help) may be miscounted.

In short: clop reliably handles --help, -f FILE, and stdin for one-option-per-line layouts. Anything else, such as -h, man, info, subcommand trees, or unusual formatting, is not yet handled directly, but you can almost always feed it in manually with -f or -.

Security

Naming a program makes clop run program --help (and program --version to record its version), exactly as if you had typed them yourself. Therefore, only pass names of programs you trust. To analyze help text without running anything, capture it first and read it from a file or stdin:

untrusted --help > help.txt
clop -f help.txt

The script itself never passes your input to a shell, never uses eval, and treats help text strictly as text (shell glob characters in --help output are not expanded).