IMO, the advantage of flags is in the fact that a human can copy/paste the command line invocation and get all they need to reproduce an execution. That’s great

IMO, the advantage of flags is in the fact that a human can copy/paste the command line invocation and get all they need to reproduce an execution. That’s great. But when the command line invocation is so big that you can barely even copy/paste it any more, and it exceeds the max command line length on a stock Linux kernel, you’re way past the point of convenience being the important factor. All the normal places you’d want to see the flags (set +e in a bash script echoing them back to you, etc) are suddenly overloaded with megabytes of text for a command line invocation… who’s gonna look at all that? Who is this serving any more? “Flags for everything” would seem like a good idea taken way too far to me.