And to add to your point, in my experience I've had "long-lived" scripts that the flags change meaning over the years. This is extremely rare on base-level installs, but frighteningly more common on the inhouse-programs I've had to deal with.

The long flags are less likely to be changed over time. The script will usually fail gracefully and I don't also need to relearn what I was thinking 25 years ago when I first did it. (long flags are like in-command comments too)

And as others have pointed out -v(ersion) or -v(erbose) can happen too.

Related to this, they're less likely to do something unexpected.

Many programs use -v as a short flag for --version, but some (such as curl) use it as short for --verbose

Probably something you'd catch pretty quickly, but still.

The worst (well known) offender is grep -v meaning grep --invert-match just for the sheer bafflement of "verbose" now hiding what you were looking for.

That actually comes from ed and vi. The g command would search for a line that matches a given regular expression and run the following command on that line. The v command was the inverse (search for lines that don't match the given regular expression).

The default command was to just print the line. Hence the name grep

g/re/p

Wow, that's funny, I normally expect '-v' to be verbose, but maybe I just use a lot of `tar` and `curl`!

Or maybe cp, or rm, or rsync, or mount, or wget, or netcat (both gnu and bsd) ... it’s really pretty reasonable to expect -v to mean verbose ;-).

As does Python, which drives me crazy. -V is version on Python.

Very annoying. Java HotSpot uses -version, rather than --version, which is even worse. Don't mess with the standard long-form flag!

To be fair, the JVM predates GNU-style --long flags being "standard". Lots of older programs use "X11-style" -long flags (that many pre-X11 programs used, like `find`).

Long flags are a GNUism, not a "standard" by any means. The closest that comes to a standard in this space are POSIX utility conventions [1].

[1]: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1...

I get it wrong every damn time. 16 years and counting.

Same! Somehow I also start confusing this with somewhat related tools like gcc. It's rare enough that I need to query these that it's all blurry in my memory again by next time. "huh I guess gcc was that goofy one with just one dash.." Nope.

There's so much variation in flags for version, I've taken the habit of always using the long `--version` flag.

... and it wrote the version to stderr up to 3.3, the stdout from 3.4; very convenient if you need to switch on version (which you do).

But also contributes to the heat death of the universe.

what doesn't?

Nah, it's already happened, and we all pop up every 10^10^100 eons to pretend this is all real.

Shhh don't share meta content with the NPCs...