6 ms·

> Honestly, in practice, I've seen many tools that support -help also allow --help and -h for those who have the muscle memory reflex for those, so it's not nea

by tomerv 4y ago

> Honestly, in practice, I've seen many tools that support -help also allow --help and -h for those who have the muscle memory reflex for those, so it's not nearly as problematic. $ javac --help javac: invalid flag: --help Usage: javac <options> <source files> use -help for a list of possible options :-(

AlexanderDhoore 4y ago
Using double -- for long named flags is a GNU-ism. Java came from Sun and so prefers the single dashes.
- oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
  But "-help" is just "-h -e -l -p" ...
  - VWWHFSfQ 4y ago
    Which is also a gnuism
    - oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
      That's my point - "-help" violates the gnu standard.
      - lou1306 4y ago
        That's his point, Sun has nothing to do with Gnu so they are not bound to their "standards".
      - arccy 4y ago
        the point was that that gnu is not a universal standard
    - anjbe 4y ago
      “-help” being equivalent to “-h -e -l -p” is not a GNUism. It’s described by POSIX. If a utility takes the options “-a” and “-o something” and uses POSIX getopt(), then these are all equivalent: cmd -ao arg path path cmd -a -o arg path path cmd -o arg -a path path cmd -a -o arg -- path path cmd -a -oarg path path cmd -aoarg path path
dcminter 4y ago
A long time ago I filed a bug with Sun about inconsistent flags on the JDK tooling. As I recall it they fixed the sole specific example that I cited instead of reviewing them all...
- dcminter 4y ago
  Ooh, I think this might have been the one (at least the mention of rmi and MS style paths would be consistent with what I recall working on at the time): https://bugs.java.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=5083924 https://bugs.java.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=5083924