[throwaway894345]

To boot:

In general, many popular unix utilities are cryptically named and they are not holistically designed. Consequently different programs take different flags for the same semantic, or some flags must be prefixed with a single dash and others with two dashes, or some flags are required to be passed in a particular order, or to view the docs for some commands it's `man command` and for others it's a `--help` flag but in all cases they're written for power users, or the fact that gnu utilities don't have the same interface as bsd utilities, etc.

And then there's the hot mess that is bash (or sh or zsh or...)...

[dfcowell]

I still occasionally stumble on the sequencing of arguments for chmod/chown and I can’t tell you off the top of my head which demands -r or -R. I’ve been doing this for years.

[throwaway894345]

Oof, yeah, I hear you. Also I can never remember useradd vs adduser. That's hardly a scratch on the surface of the issues I have with unix utilities. Which isn't to say that I've seen any operating system with better utilities, but it's not hard to imagine (with the benefit of hindsight) how these might've been better designed.