Support 'help' as a synonym for '?' in command line options

For command line options which permit '?' meaning 'please list the
permitted values', add support for 'help' as a synonym, by abstracting
the check out into a helper function.

This change means that in some cases where we were being lazy in
our string parsing, "?junk" will now be rejected as an invalid option
rather than being (undocumentedly) treated the same way as "?".

Update the documentation to use 'help' rather than '?', since '?'
is a shell metacharacter and thus prone to fail confusingly if there
is a single character filename in the current working directory and
the '?' has not been escaped. It's therefore better to steer users
towards 'help', though '?' is retained for backwards compatibility.

We do not, however, update the output of the system emulator's -help
(or any documentation autogenerated from the qemu-options.hx which
is the source of the -help text) because libvirt parses our -help
output and will break. At a later date when QEMU provides a better
interface so libvirt can avoid having to do this, we can update the
-help text too.

Signed-off-by: Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Anthony Liguori <aliguori@us.ibm.com>

1 files changed, 18 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/qemu-common.h b/qemu-common.h
index d26ff39e87..dd91912024 100644
--- a/qemu-common.h
+++ b/qemu-common.h
@@ -136,6 +136,24 @@ int qemu_main(int argc, char **argv, char **envp);
 void qemu_get_timedate(struct tm *tm, int offset);
 int qemu_timedate_diff(struct tm *tm);
 
+/**
+ * is_help_option:
+ * @s: string to test
+ *
+ * Check whether @s is one of the standard strings which indicate
+ * that the user is asking for a list of the valid values for a
+ * command option like -cpu or -M. The current accepted strings
+ * are 'help' and '?'. '?' is deprecated (it is a shell wildcard
+ * which makes it annoying to use in a reliable way) but provided
+ * for backwards compatibility.
+ *
+ * Returns: true if @s is a request for a list.
+ */
+static inline bool is_help_option(const char *s)
+{
+    return !strcmp(s, "?") || !strcmp(s, "help");
+}
+
 /* cutils.c */
 void pstrcpy(char *buf, int buf_size, const char *str);
 void strpadcpy(char *buf, int buf_size, const char *str, char pad);