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A secondary benefit not mentioned in the article is immutability.

Long flags on a command line utility should never change. Short flags may be modified between major versions of a utility, which would break scripts.

Of course this is just a convention, and I'm sure it's not followed 100%. I'll take whatever protection I can get though.

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Neither long flags or short flags should change meaning. I'm not sure where you got the idea that short flags do.

You now, I'm really not sure where I picked that up. It's always been my understanding that it was acceptable to change the short flags on a utility as part of a new major version. Not that you should change 'em capriciously, but that it wasn't the end of the world if you did.

Of course, I can't find any references to back me up on that, so you may very well be correct.

"GNU grep 2.12 changes behavior of recursion options, breaks existing scripts": http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4295681

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