When the -help or -h flags are undefined and invoked, the flag package handles this situation as a special case and prints a nice and helpful default help text, but exit the process with exit code 2. This proposal proposes the exit code be 0 by default and configurable for this specific case.

Emphasis: this proposal does not propose/incur any changes to programs which has -h or -help defined.

As a concrete example, using gofmt, which uses the flag package and does not have -help or -h defined, the behavior today is:

$ gofmt -help
usage: gofmt [flags] [path ...]
  -cpuprofile string
        write cpu profile to this file
<...abbreviated...>
$ echo $?
2

The proposed behavior is:

$ gofmt -help
usage: gofmt [flags] [path ...]
  -cpuprofile string
        write cpu profile to this file
<...abbreviated...>
$ echo $?
0