Also, this fits in with advice #3, use common options. Users aren't "blindly" adding -v for verbosity; they're expecting it as a common option. Admittedly, the

Also, this fits in with advice #3, use common options. Users aren't "blindly" adding -v for verbosity; they're expecting it as a common option. Admittedly, the verbose/version/something else distinction is not as standard as I'd like, but if I were writing this I would have explicitly said in point 3, "-v is verbose. -V is version. -h is help. -?, if implemented at all, is a synonym for --help. -n is dry run, if that makes sense for your command. (By the way, unknown flags should cause the command to fail rather than silently do the wrong thing.) The first instance of -- causes all further arguments to be blindly accepted as positional arguments rather than flags, including further uses of --. If at all possible, all command forwarding (e.g., ssh, shell, autocall) is done using multiple positional params, not nested quoting nightmares."