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Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org, utisoft@gmail.com
Subject: Re: Date representation as YY/DDD or YYYY/DDD
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>> 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.
you exaggerate a bit.

for example rsync does have >26 options but most make sense for program 
that is dedicated to one task, and it isn't against Unix paradigm.

But it have one letter shortcuts for mostly used parameters