I wonder, is there a kind of reference of the common command
line interface conventions that the CLI's of the software
included in Debian should adhere to?
E. g., I see that tree (as of 1.5.3-1) doesn't support the --
POSIX options' terminator:
$ tree -- .
tree: Invalid argument -`-'.
usage: tree [-adfghilnpqrstuvxACDFNS] [-H baseHREF] [-T title ] [-L level [-R]]
[-P pattern] [-I pattern] [-o filename] [--version] [--help] [--inodes]
[--device] [--noreport] [--nolinks] [--dirsfirst] [--charset charset]
[--filelimit #] [<directory list>]
$
Another issue is that while the majority (in my experience) of
commands will direct --help's output to stdout, some will use
stderr instead, which is slightly inconvenient.
One more issue is that some commands implement GNU long options
with a particular flaw that --option=ARGUMENT is /not/ accepted
as synonymous to --option ARGUMENT, which makes it impossible to
use the following short form:
$ foo --bar={baz,qux}
which is, thanks to the Bash syntax, is equivalent to:
$ foo --bar=baz --bar=qux
There's even a more subtle issue with the software designed to
process an arbitrary number of files per run lacking support for
either of --files-from= or --null options (as implemented by,
e. g., tar(1)), which leads to an unnecessary constraint on the
number of files that can be processed in a single run. (There's
no need for this feature in cat(1) and the like, though.)
--
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