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Date:      Sat, 6 Jun 2009 11:46:48 +0200
From:      Ruben de Groot <mail25@bzerk.org>
To:        Kirk Strauser <kirk@strauser.com>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org, utisoft@gmail.com
Subject:   Re: Date representation as YY/DDD or YYYY/DDD
Message-ID:  <20090606094648.GA10672@ei.bzerk.org>
In-Reply-To: <4A29EBB7.9090100@strauser.com>
References:  <alpine.BSF.2.00.0906040113270.28607@wojtek.tensor.gdynia.pl> <200906050924.23167.kirk@strauser.com> <b79ecaef0906050950m53fda524i5652f57b1ac389ad@mail.gmail.com> <200906051208.43135.kirk@strauser.com> <b79ecaef0906051323s64a89fe2x134290524b633978@mail.gmail.com> <4A29EBB7.9090100@strauser.com>

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On Fri, Jun 05, 2009 at 11:08:23PM -0500, Kirk Strauser typed:
> Chris Rees wrote:
> 
> >Traditional:
> >
> >% tar xzvf bluurgh.tgz
> >
> >GNU recommended:
> >
> >$ tar --extract --verbose --gunzip --file bluurgh.tgz
> >
> >Seriously, why are long options encouraged?
> 
> Scripting.  I almost always use long options when writing scripts I 
> might use again later so that 6 months later I don't have to remember 
> what some single-letter option meant.  I pretty much never use them on 
> the command line, though.

Agreed, the long options *as an alternative* can be descriptive in scripts,
tutorials, howto's etc.
The other reason often mentioned, there being not enough letters in the 
alphabet to cover all possible options, in my opinion advocates bloated 
software (one program can do it all), which goes against the Unix paradigm
of making small programs that do one task exceptionally well and just
chaining these together.

Ruben




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