Building a CLI for All of Cloudflare

Re:Building a CLI for All of Cloudflare by joshka on Monday April 13, 2026 @07:47PM (#47759449)

My perspective on the rationale for splitting short/long help is that optimizing for the reader's time is a reasonable thing to do. Often I just need a refresher of what options are available. But sometimes I need a deeper understanding of what each option controls and how. (Yes I understand that this should be in man pages). There needs to be a reasonable way to control the verbosity of the help output from the command line however.

I agree with your point that most flags should generally treat short versions as exact aliases to long flags, but I just think that a convention that treats -h and --help as concise vs long is 100% reasonable. The distinction is often breadth vs depth.

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Re:Building a CLI for All of Cloudflare by dec0dedab0de on Tuesday April 14, 2026 @10:18AM (#47766001)

That would be a perfectly reasonable convention, except it's already a convention that they do the same thing.

Having them be different could cause someone to look at -h, and not even know about --help. Or if someone writes a script parsing the output of -h for some reason, someone else might come along and change it to --help expecting it to be the same thing.

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Re:Building a CLI for All of Cloudflare by joshka on Tuesday April 14, 2026 @06:24PM (#47772259)

The rust crate clap which is one of the more well known crates for command line parsing gets about 2M downloads a day and has this convention built in.

This convention existed before clap came into being, but I don't recall when I first saw it. I have been using the command line for just shy of 40 years across various operating systems.

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