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The GNU hello
program produces a familiar, friendly greeting.
It allows nonprogrammers to use a classic computer science tool which
would otherwise be unavailable to them. Because it is protected by
the GNU General Public License, users are free (in perpetuity) to
share and change it.
For the latest updates and other information, please visit the GNU Hello home page at http://www.gnu.org/software/hello/.
Not to spoil the joke, but of course the practical purpose of GNU Hello is to serve as a minimal example of a GNU package. So, although most manuals don't need to discuss the implementation of the programs they document, that is part of the goal here.
First, GNU Hello follows the GNU coding standards (see Preface) and GNU maintainer standards (see Preface). These are the basic documents which all GNU packages should adhere to.
The Hello package also implements recommended development practices not embodied in the standards, using other GNU packages and features:
getopt_long
function
(see Getopt Long Options) to parse options,
thus supporting GNU-style long options such as --help.
help2man
(see Overview) from the
--help output. This relieves the maintainers of the burden
of maintaining man documentation separately, yet provides a reasonable
overview for man devotees.
GNU Hello is implemented in C. GNU Gettext contains “hello world” examples in a variety of other programming languages; see the Gettext home page at http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/.
GNU hello
was written by Mike Haertel, David MacKenzie, Jan
Brittenson, Charles Hannum, Roland McGrath, Noah Friedman, Karl
Eichwalder, Karl Berry, and The King.