[DOCS] `--input-format` help text incorrectly says it "only works with --print"

Documentation Type

Incorrect/outdated documentation

Documentation Location

claude --help (CLI output, v2.1.220)

Section/Topic

--input-format flag description in claude --help

Current Documentation

claude --help currently says:

  --input-format <format>               Input format (only works with --print):
                                        "text" (default), or "stream-json"
                                        (realtime streaming input) (choices:
                                        "text", "stream-json")

What's Wrong or Missing?

--input-format does not require --print. It works without it, which is easy to verify:

echo '{"type":"user","message":{"role":"user","content":[{"type":"text","text":"Reply with exactly: NOPRINT-OK"}]}}' \
  | claude --output-format stream-json --verbose --input-format stream-json

This emits system/init, runs the turn, and returns a result message with subtype: "success" and result: "NOPRINT-OK" — no --print anywhere on the command line, and no error about a missing flag.

This is not an edge case. It is how the Agent SDK itself invokes the binary: the bundled sdk.mjs builds the argument list

["--output-format","stream-json","--verbose","--input-format","stream-json"]

and never passes --print. So the --help text contradicts the behavior of Anthropic's own SDK.

The website is already correct here, which makes this an inconsistency between two Anthropic sources rather than a uniformly wrong description. https://code.claude.com/docs/en/cli-reference describes the same flag as:

--input-format — Specify input format for print mode (options: text, stream-json)

That wording is accurate. Only the --help string asserts the hard requirement.

The practical cost is for anyone writing a host process against the streaming protocol: --help reads as "you must also pass --print", which is misleading, and it obscures that --input-format stream-json is the bidirectional mode rather than a variant of one-shot print mode.

Suggested Improvement

Bring the --help string in line with the cli-reference wording, for example:

  --input-format <format>               Input format for non-interactive mode:
                                        "text" (default), or "stream-json"
                                        (realtime streaming input) (choices:
                                        "text", "stream-json")

Removing "only works with --print" is the substantive fix. If there is a supported distinction between -p --input-format stream-json and --input-format stream-json on its own, documenting that difference explicitly would be more useful still, since the second form is what SDK-style hosts actually use.

Impact

Low - Minor confusion or inconvenience

Additional Context

Verified on macOS with Claude Code 2.1.220, and the same --help string is present in 2.1.181. The --help text is unchanged between those versions.