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  • I’m voting to close this question because "Why some tool does X" is a usually pointless question, as usually the answer is "because someone felt it was useful to do X and spent time and effort implementing it". Commented Feb 20 at 3:40
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    @muru, I don't know. It might not be such a pointless question in general, since for a lot of the behaviours of standard / common tools, there might well be a reasonable technical explanation, one that a reasonably experienced user might be able to at least guess at (if not even able to point at documantion explaining it). Of course in some cases, there might not be such clear-cut reasons, and it could go back to what the developer felt was good at the time. (Or what the developer of the original version ended up with 50 years ago on their PDP-11.) Commented Feb 21 at 10:47
  • Some tools print their help texts to stderr, even if explicitely called as sometool --help. Well, I suppose it's not like the normal output of the tool, but always meant for the user, similarly to actual error messages. But it makes it a bit annoying to try to grep a longer output for a particular option... GNU tools seem to print help texts to stdout, so it can go both ways. Commented Feb 21 at 10:50
  • @ilkkachu there might be. And if someone can bring evidence of an actual technical reason, sure, we can always reopen. But I would swap "a lot" and "some". And I personally would rather such questions be answered with facts rather than guesses, whether from users experienced or otherwise. Guesses are how myths are born and propagated. Commented Feb 21 at 10:54
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    It seems to me there are two parts to this question: one is “why does this go to standard error?”, and that’s addressed by this Q&A; the other is “why does dumpe2fs always show its version?”, and that can only be answered by its authors. Ted Ts’o at least does frequent this site, so that’s not impossible (and someone could just ask directly). Commented Feb 23 at 14:40