Re: A simple hate today.

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From: A. Pagaltzis
Subject: Re: A simple hate today.
Date: 18:04 on 26 May 2006
* David Champion <dgc@xxxxxxxx.xxx> [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/>;
There's stuff above here

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