-Mercurial provides a built-in help system. This is invaluable for
-those times when you find yourself stuck trying to remember how to run
-a command. If you are completely stuck, simply run “hg help”; it will
-print a brief list of commands, along with a description of what each
-does. If you ask for help on a specific command (as below), it prints
-more detailed information.
-
- $ hg help init
- hg init [-e CMD] [--remotecmd CMD] [DEST]
-
- create a new repository in the given directory
-
- Initialize a new repository in the given directory. If the given
- directory does not exist, it is created.
-
- If no directory is given, the current directory is used.
-
- It is possible to specify an ssh:// URL as the destination.
- Look at the help text for the pull command for important details
- about ssh:// URLs.
-
- options:
-
- -e --ssh specify ssh command to use
- --remotecmd specify hg command to run on the remote side
-
- use "hg -v help init" to show global options
-
-For a more impressive level of detail (which you won’t usually need)
-run “hg help -v”. The -v option is short for --verbose, and tells
-Mercurial to print more information than it usually would.
+Git provides a built-in help system. This is invaluable for those
+times when you find yourself stuck trying to remember how to run a
+command. If you are completely stuck, simply run “git help”; it will
+print a brief list of commonly-used commands, along with a description
+of what each does. If you ask for help on a specific command (such as
+"git help init"), it prints more detailed information. [XXX: Does "git
+help <foo>" work universally as a built-in or does it expect man to be
+present and just call out to "man git-<foo>"?]
+
+ [XXX: The original hgbook includes the complete output of "hg
+ help init" at this point. I'm not including the corresponding
+ "git help init" output as it would be excessively long. The
+ description alone is quite reasonable, (other than a
+ not-too-helpful aside about the obsolete git-init-db command),
+ but it only comes after a full screen's worth of options
+ details. Might it make sense to have a more summarized help
+ output for "git help <foo>" than all of the documentation
+ available for git-<foo>? And perhaps alos provide a "git -v
+ help" similar to "hg -v help" for more?]