Re: collect2 outputs help to stderr

[Ian Lance Taylor]

Simon Howard <address@hidden> writes:

> The collect2 program, part of ld, gives the output from its --help
> option to stderr rather than stdout.  This makes it impossible to type
> "collect2 | more" to display the help a page at a time.  It also
> contravenes the GNU coding standards which specify that output should
> be to stdout:
> 
> http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html#Command_002dLine-Interfaces
> 
> --help
>     This option should output brief documentation for how to invoke
> the program, on standard output, then exit successfully.
> 
> This is with GNU ld version 2.15

The collect2 program is not part of ld.  It is part of gcc.  ld --help
correctly reports to stdout.

collect2 is a wrapper program provided by gcc which invokes ld.  From
a brief glance, it looks to me like collect2 gathers stdout and stderr
into one stream, and then dumps that stream on stderr while demangling
any symbols.

Anyhow, this bug needs to be fixed by the gcc project, not the
binutils project.

Ian