On Tue, 13 Dec 2022 at 07:25, Ralph Corderoy wrote:

Hi u34,

...

I think long command line options are more readable compared to short one. There fore, I suggest:

I think the short one-letter names combined into a single ‘-’ are more readable, as I suspect do many others accustomed to their decades-long use across all Unix commands, so I suggest things stay as they are. :-)

The added benefit is that the short options are faster to search for in the man page.

On 2022-12-13 at 10:34:59 +0000, Lukas Jirkovsky wrote:

On Tue, 13 Dec 2022 at 07:25, Ralph Corderoy wrote:

...

Hi u34,

...

I think long command line options are more readable compared to short one. There fore, I suggest:

I think the short one-letter names combined into a single ‘-’ are more readable, as I suspect do many others accustomed to their decades-long use across all Unix commands, so I suggest things stay as they are. :-)

For commands and options I've been using for decades, absolutely. For newer or lesser used commands, or commands with newer options, well, maybe. Now who told tar and ps that they don't need the dash? ;-)

The added benefit is that the short options are faster to search for in the man page.

Unless there's --long-option and --other-option, in which case searching for -o takes longer. And searching for various regular expressions that fail on various man pages definitely takes even more longerer™. TL;DR: I'm usually in favor of using long options in a script (those decades-old commands and options notwithstanding). Without the man page, I have some chance of figuring out what --use-regular-expressions does, but less of spotting the "e" (and figuring out what it does) in the middle of -loser.

On 2022-12-13 at 17:56:45 +0000, Ralph Corderoy wrote:

...

well, maybe.

My point was to show it's subjective.

Fair enough. On that we agree.

...

Now who told tar and ps that they don't need the dash? ;-)

Someone who created the dash to show the argument contained optional options rather than a filename. If they're not optional then the dash isn't required. :-)

I'll give that to you for tar, but the options are ps are, in fact, optional.

On Tue, 13 Dec 2022 12:43:28 -0500, 2QdxY4RzWzUUiLuE@potatochowder.com

... Unless there's --long-option and --other-option, in which case searching for -o takes longer.

Side note: I usually search for ` -o` to avoid that. The double space is so that it doesn't match -o in the middle of a sentence. But, I'm also in favor of long option names in scripts. Merlin -- Merlin Büge

On 2022-12-14 at 06:02:58 +0300, Greg Minshall wrote:

2QdxY4RzWzUUiLuE@potatochowder.com wrote:

...

Now who told tar and ps that they don't need the dash? ;-)

probably you didn't *really* want a history lesson (which i'm not *really* qualified to give), but in the 1980s there was an effort to standardize all this. earlier commands had, or hadn't, used a dash. dashes were now considered a requirement. but, there would have been a grandfather clause for, e.g., ps, tar, and friends.

IIRC, SystemV ps required a dash (which is why I type "ps -ef"), but BSD ps didn't/doesn't (which is why I still type "ps -auxww").

slightly later, but still, i think, in the 1980s, long options were standardized to use two dashes. but, again, grandfathered in were no dashes (like dd), one dash (like [n]mh).

Long options are *not* standardized, at least not in the sense that there's a specification from which to write a parser.⁰ Certain specific options are pervasive (e.g., --verbose) and enshrined in GNU guidelines.¹

on the main subject, but still historical, i am reminded of the arguments we had about GUI versus command line interfaces for actual computer operators (tapes, disk drives, print out, card readers, etc.). for novice operators, or even experienced operators using rare commands, a GUI was desirable. for experienced operators doing the same thing over and over again, the command line. (sadly, i don't see the relevance here!)

Old xterm man pages contained the "bug" that most commands hadn't been rewritten for X11. And here we are, four decades later, inventing all manner of kluges to automate and/or script GUIs (and don't even get me started on the WWW). :-) Apple's AU/X had (I don't use MacOS X now) a thing called Commando, which turned a machine-readable description of a program's command line arguments into a dialong box, a sort of "best of both worlds" solution. ⁰ https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_chap12.html ¹ https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html