All Questions
7
questions
0
votes
1
answer
87
views
When and why was the single dash introduced for command line options?
Already in the 1980ies, ls -l did mostly what it does today. For a boolean option, in this case l, I hardly ever questioned why it is prefixed with a dash: without an indicator, ls l would mean "...
- 928
2
votes
2
answers
87
views
Why is `-W` reserved for vendor extensions?
Why does the POSIX standard reserve the -W option for vendor extensions of the system utilities? I do not understand why the letter ‘W’ is used. ‘V’ (for vendor) could make more sense.
Maybe this ...
- 1,071
0
votes
1
answer
99
views
Why does the option --add_extra_groups in adduser contain underscore rather than hyphen word delimiters?
Premise
Most of the long-form options in the various *nix tools use hyphens as word separators.
Examples
from man tr:
--squeeze-repeats
--truncate-set1
from man sudo:
--preserve-env
--set-home
--...
- 722
1
vote
4
answers
131
views
Why is it find dir -name file and not find -n dir file?
I've searched around for this but I couldn't find anything on it.
I've always wanted to know, why is it that most other built in bash commands have the format of command -flag arg1 arg2, i.e. cp -r ...
- 289
7
votes
1
answer
2k
views
Why is the xargs -i option deprecated?
I was reading the Linux man page for xargs recently, and it appears that the -i option is deprecated. To quote from the documentation:
-i[replace-str], --replace[=replace-str]
This ...
- 223
5
votes
1
answer
318
views
Why did "argument can be squished against option" prevail over "argument is always separate"?
Inspired by the recent question Why does the specific sequence of options matter for tar command?, in which the asker learned why tar -cfv test.tar *.jpg doesn't work, I'd like to ask a followup: ...
user41515
54
votes
6
answers
30k
views
Single dashes `-` for single-character options, but double dashes `--` for words?
Where did the convention of using single dashes for letters and doubles dashes for words come from and why is continued to be used?
For example if I type in ls --help, you see:
-a, --all ...
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