4 ms·

Except that long options are unportable. And they don't really help that much, unless your man pages suck. As for discoverability: again, that's what man page

• woodruffw 5y ago
  Unportability is, for better or worse, a moot point when the GNU coreutils form the de facto standard for most actual shell scripting. It's also not relevant in the context of shell scripting with tools that aren't intended to be part of POSIX or any other standard. Plenty of ecosystems and workflows are built on proprietary, internal, or just not standardized tools.
  • messe 5y ago
    For most linux distributions sure, GNU might be considered a standard. But if you want your script to work on macOS or BSD, or even for example Alpine linux, then you can't just treat GNU as standard.
    • shatteredgate 5y ago
      All of those systems have a way to install the GNU utils and I have seen that they all do so when compatibility is important. https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/package/edge/main/x86_64/coreutils https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/package/edge/main/x86_64/coreut... https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/coreutils https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/coreutils https://cgit.freebsd.org/ports/tree/sysutils/coreutils https://cgit.freebsd.org/ports/tree/sysutils/coreutils
      • deleted 5y ago
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