[3np]

One of my pet-peeves on a similar note is the inconsistencies between different ssh commands on if it's -p or -P that signifies the target port.

Apart from the obvious compatibility and legacy factor, I think a major reason is that by the time someone has both enough knowledge and experience to formulate a proper solution and have felt the pain-points, they're already deep enough that they've internalized that this is The Way It Is and are somewhat comfortable with it, those annoying flags aside.

We tend to settle on the lowest common denominator, because consistency and time-to-ready trumps any actual improvements. For example, I'd so much prefer vim bindings in tmux but stopped using customizations like that completely since it turns out it's less of a hassle to just get used to the crappy standard ones instead of customizing it on every new host I start up.

If you can't get your friends off Facebook, good luck getting engineers off POSIX.

[cgh]

Argh yes, scp -P vs ssh -p. I get bitten by this regularly as we have something running on a non-standard port.