I would argue (at the risk of being down-voted) that if you are scripting tools then it is important to use the long option, not just because future-you might forget what the options are (relevant XKCD http://xkcd.com/1168/), but also for searchability, it's rather difficult in almost any engine (except the wonderful new code-orientated ones that are cropping) up to search for `-xvzf`, but rather simpler to search for `extract verbose zip filename +tar`, for example.