How to get meaningful help pages for aws CLI subcommands like `aws s3 cp`? - Amazon Web Sevices

CorneliusRoemer
February 8, 2023
259 views
0 votes
2 Answers

I’m trying to figure out what options there are for the aws s3 cp CLI command but neither of the following work.

When I use --help or -h I get the following useless CLI output that doesn’t say anything about s3, let alone s3 cp subcommands:

$ aws s3 cp --help
     
usage: aws [-h] [--profile PROFILE] [--debug]

options:
  -h, --help         show this help message and exit
  --profile PROFILE
  --debug

Neither can I find man pages using man aws, man aws-s3 or man aws-s3-cp.

I know I can find the docs online: https://awscli.amazonaws.com/v2/documentation/api/latest/reference/s3/cp.html but how do I get similar information directly in my terminal?

Answers

Chosen as BEST ANSWER
- CorneliusRoemer
- February 8, 2023 at 5:14 pm
- 0 votes
0
The unintuitive answer is to type help without the --. When you type:
```
aws s3 cp help
```
you get the appropriate man page to open in a pager:
```
CP()                                                                      CP()



NAME
       cp -

DESCRIPTION
       Copies a local file or S3 object to another location locally or in S3.

SYNOPSIS
            cp
          <LocalPath> <S3Uri> or <S3Uri> <LocalPath> or <S3Uri> <S3Uri>
          [--dryrun]
          [--quiet]
          [--include <value>]
          [--exclude <value>]
...
```
I don't quite understand why aws decided to not accept the nearly universal standard -h for subcommands. Maybe someone can enlighten me in the comments.

Adding help works everywhere, even on a raw aws as aws help which again opens a manpage. Strange that this help addition is not listed when passing -h.