Re:Unix Wildcards Gone Wild
by emmelaich on Sunday August 17, 2014 @07:50PM
(#8190886)
They were quite distinct.
When --longopt was starting to get popular (in an ad-hoc way) for gnu and other utilities there was a poll (gnu.misc? late 90s?) whether to make it a gnu standard. The other choices were a +, or have commands not accept both bundled single letter options and longopts. There may have been other choices I've forgotten about.
The double-dash won. There were some people who were concerned that it might be confused with the end-of-args double dash.
Maybe that is true but they are certainly unambiguously parsed.
When --longopt was starting to get popular (in an ad-hoc way) for gnu and other utilities there was a poll (gnu.misc? late 90s?) whether to make it a gnu standard. The other choices were a +, or have commands not accept both bundled single letter options and longopts. There may have been other choices I've forgotten about.
The double-dash won. There were some people who were concerned that it might be confused with the end-of-args double dash.
Maybe that is true but they are certainly unambiguously parsed.