Marked help on Windows throws

[poke]

Running marked with the --help or -h option fails on Windows with the following error:

events.js:72
        throw er; // Unhandled 'error' event
              ^
Error: spawn ENOENT
    at errnoException (child_process.js:975:11)
    at Process.ChildProcess._handle.onexit (child_process.js:766:34)

This happens because of line 26 in /bin/marked:

  spawn('man',
    [__dirname + '/../man/marked.1'],
    options);

Here, marked tries to open up man which is a unix tool for reading help, and which is not available on Windows.

I’d suggest either replacing this by some built-in way, or switching to some command line parser instead which already offers command line help (for example node-optimist).

[joshbruce]

Closing as stale. Please resubmit, if necessary.

[poke]

Why was this closed exactly? Nothing has changed since I opened this issue.

[joshbruce]

Hey @poke, trying to catch up with the project, please see #956.

Is it still an issue for you after updating to marked 0.3.7?

[poke]

Ah, I see! Good to see the project gaining new momentum! :)

I haven’t used marked for quite a while, so I cannot comment on how it works right now. However, if I trust my past self (I kind of do) then the problem was that marked’s help ended up calling man to display the help (instead of doing that itself). And the line that does that is still in the current source. So I would make a very safe guess, that this problem is still current.

That being said, it’s really low-priority, so putting this very far back in the backlog is likely an appropriate action here.

[joshbruce]

@poke: Thanks. Part of going through the issues back-to-front is to also figure out how many people are still paying attention to this library. On NPM it's a very popular package; however, it's also been around for quite some time. So, thank you for the details and arriving at the same conclusion.

I will leave this issue closed because it is still referenced in 956, which also acts as a sort of consolidation approach.