Of course I personally would go with option two, where its documented that the abbreviations exist but are subject to change and you shouldn't rely on them.

Also, how would we know if no one has died from this? The practice of abbreviating commands literally makes forensics more difficult to accomplish, making it harder to know.

Do you have an example? None of the command-line tools I use every day work that way. The usual workflow is 1- type a couple characters; 2- press <tab> to complete. The second step is crucial because it ensures you run the right command.

For conflicts (does 'd' refer to delete or disable?) the more commonly used command is usually what the abbreviation will expand to (so GDB accepts 'd' for "delete").

git has something similar, although it's disabled by default (help.autocorrect option).

> npm and gem behave like this

No, `npm` has a couple aliases like "i" for "install", but you can’t use "in", "ins", "insta", etc. It has "view" and "version" but "v" is an alias for "view".

`gem` does work like this (#TIL), although it has some hard-coded aliases: while its help page says "Commands may be abbreviated, so long as they are unambiguous", `gem i` works as `gem install` even if there’s a command "info". If you try `gem in`, it does complain that it’s ambiguous.

This really is a very weak position. More fool them for being so lazy and short-sighted that they can't be bothered to type out the command in a script in full. If I saw that, I would immediately make a change and submit a pull request or whatnot to get it changed for the better, in the cause of keeping the workspace safe, clean, and tidy.