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Comment by 0942v8653 | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it's really bash, more the utilities' inconsistent APIs and single-letter flags (which are not descriptive at all). Each command has its own API with different options, so it takes a lot of exposure to really learn them.

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If you don't like single letter flags, most have options for longer, more descriptive flags that do the same thing. For example, you can either do:

   Make -I dir

   Make --include-dir=dir

Choose whichever one makes most sense.

this.

anyone who uses single letter options on a script should be punished.

single letters are for one time typing.

Single letters are sometimes more known than their full option equivalents. Quick, without a man page, what's the short alias for `tar --get` ?

I have no idea because I memorized 'tar zxvf' a long time ago [1] and I have to google everything else.

[1] https://xkcd.com/1597/

I thought you'd post this one https://xkcd.com/1168/

These days tar autodetects zipfiles, and you don't usually need to see the files as they come out, so you can do 'tar xf' instead...

I wouldn't use "--get". If I wanted to use the long option, I'd use "--extract".

Until you find yourself on (Free)BSD, where it doesn't look like the long options are supported: https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?make(1)

It's here: https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=gmake

It depends:

is portable, whereas:

    source

is not... which was a surprise. :)

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