2. Common options

Certain options are available in all these programs. Rather than writing identical descriptions for each of the programs, they are described here. (In fact, every GNU program accepts (or should accept) these options.)

A few of these programs take arbitrary strings as arguments. In those cases, `--help' and `--version' are taken as these options only if there is one and exactly one command line argument.

`--help'

Print a usage message listing all available options, then exit successfully.

`--version'

Print the version number, then exit successfully.