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Status

Current state: Under Discussion

Discussion thread: here [Change the link from the KIP proposal email archive to your own email thread]

JIRA: here 

Please keep the discussion on the mailing list rather than commenting on the wiki (wiki discussions get unwieldy fast).

Motivation

Currently, the '--help' option is not recognized by some Kafka commands . For example:

$ kafka-console-producer --help
help is not a recognized option

However, the '--help' option is supported by other commands:

$ kafka-verifiable-producer --help
usage: verifiable-producer [-h] --topic TOPIC --broker-list HOST1:PORT1[,HOST2:PORT2[...]] [--max-messages MAX-MESSAGES] [--throughput THROUGHPUT] [--acks ACKS]
                           [--producer.config CONFIG_FILE] [--message-create-time CREATETIME] [--value-prefix VALUE-PREFIX]

...

To provide a consistent user experience, it would be nice to add a '--help' option to all Kafka commands.

Public Interfaces

 Add a  '--help' option to all Kafka commands that provides information about their usage.

Proposed Changes

Parsing logic of the Kafka commands shall be modified to handle the "--help" option.

Compatibility, Deprecation, and Migration Plan

• There won't be any change of current behavior. '--help' is a new option for CLI commands.