[klodolph]

Can’t you just use --long options everywhere?

For, like, 95% of the tools out there, I’m going to use --long every single time.

Anyway, I don’t even know the options that a program takes until I read the program docs. The program docs will tell me that the option is -host=localhost or --host=localhost or --bind-addr=localhost:8000.

The other 5% are tools like ls, cp, mv. As far as I care, ancient tools are the only ones permitted to have short options that combine into a single option, like old-school getopt. Maybe a few exceptions now and then.

[cratermoon]

I use short options when I'm typing at the command line, but for scripts I prefer the long options by a wide margin. It's just too painful to come back to script after some time and see a string of short options that looks like line noise barfed out of a 300 baud modem.