Iptables suffers from the common "it's a command line program so we are going to use getopt to parse it" I find the getopt style... tolerable at best for short

Iptables suffers from the common "it's a command line program so we are going to use getopt to parse it" I find the getopt style... tolerable at best for short commands. But for long expressions in a dsl(like find or iptables) it is noisy and ugly. Iptables would have been twice as nice to use if they got rid of all the pointless dashes(and I have written preprocessors to do just this). The clearest example of this was the megaraid command for lsi raid cards. It's commands are documented in the getopt style but I accidentally found out that the dashes were optional. And while the syntax was still sort of ass, my scripts were much easier to read.