* David Champion <d...@uchicago.edu> [2006-05-26 18:50]: > And sometimes also --help, even though I rarely use > --godawful-long-options.
I provide long synonyms for all short options. (Getopt::Long makes this very easy.) OT1H it helps self-document the code, OTOH it's also nice for the users. Short options are much nicer when working interactively with the shell, but I find the long forms preferrable when I want to use an obscure switch in a script. Much easier to decipher `xargs -0 --verbose --no-run-if-empty` five months down the road compared to `xargs -r0t` if I never use these options. (These are rhetoric examples. I use these switches a lot. For some hateful reason, xargs assigns `-t` for `--verbose` even though it does not use `-v` for anything, and for an more hateful reason, it will run the given command by default even when its input is empty, which is *never* *ever* what I want. That this combination of switches comes out as `-r0t` is quite apt. Hate.) Regards, -- Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>
