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Comment by dosourcenotcode | Hacker News Reader

Agree that long options should be used. But there is one caveat to consider: portability.

Sadly to this day not all BSD distributions have GNU style long options. And the ones that now do only got them fairly recently. So if you want portability you have to use short options as you weep with a bottle of vodka in hand.

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Not trying to spam this thread with praises of nix, because it does have its own problems, but it certainly solves the portability problem.

Four years in to using it at work for dev environments across mac (x86 & ARM) and various linuxes and can’t imagine going back. I also always make dev environment definitions for my open source projects, so even if people aren’t using nix, there is at least a record of what tools they will need to install to run scripts, tests, etc.

Does nix work well on BSD-derived Unices? In particular, the most widespread of them, macOS?

Yes, works great on Mac. About half our engineers us Macs, the other half Linux. We have one nix configuration for the dev environment, which works for everyone.

This surprises me because the first case I remember ever coming across where short versus long options impacted portability across GNU and BSD was _fixed_ by using long options. Maybe six years ago or so I had an issue porting a script someone else had written for use in CI that happened to decode some base64 data that failed when I tried to use it on a different platform. I forget which one it was originally written for and which one I was trying to use it on, but the issue boiled down to the MacOS version of base64 using the BSD short option for decode and Linux using the GNU one, and they each used a different capitalization; one used `-d` and the other used `-D` (although I also can't remember which used which honestly). My solution was to use the long option `--decode`, which was the same on both of them, and since then the times I've needed to decode base64 I've always used the long option out of habit, which probably explains why I can't remember what option Linux uses despite it being the one I've used far more over the years since then.

I think the right way to think about this (if your goal is to avoid surprises at least) is that options (short or long) are just strings. There's no guarantee that there's a long variant of an option. There's not even a requirement that options start with a dash. A sufficiently brain-damaged developer could start them with a slash or something.

If you're going for portability the best bet is to just read the manual for each of the separate versions and do whatever works.

To this day, I write tar options with no dash, simply because I can. `tar cvzf foo.tar.gz ./foo`

I would never write a new program with this option, but I do find it a delightful historical oddity.

I've noticed that it seems to be a pattern that's used for other compression/decompression software as well. Sometimes mods I use for games will be uploaded as rars or 7zips (I guess because this stuff gets developed on and for Windows, and tarballs aren't really something people use much there), and the CLI invocations I use to extract them always look off to me, especially the 7zip one: `unrar x` and `7z x`.

That sounds reasonable to me. If anything, I might even go further and say that reading the manuals wouldn't be enough to fully convince me without also actually testing it by running a script on a given platform. It's not that I don't trust the manuals to be right, but I have less trust in myself to write bug-free code than probably any other language I've ever used, and I don't think I'd feel confident without verifying that I actually did what the manual said correctly.

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