• miniu@programming.dev
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    19
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    1 year ago

    Why when explaining, giving examples of shell command are people so often providing shortened arguments. It makes it all seam like some random letters you have to remeber by heart. Instead of -x just write --extract. If in the end they endup using the tool so often they need to write it fast they’ll check the shortcuts.

    • catacomb@beehaw.org
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      I don’t even mind the shortened arguments too much, though it doesn’t help. It’s more that every example seems to smush them together into a string of letters.

      I would have found

      tar -x -f pics.tar ./pics

      to be clearer when I was learning. There’s plenty of commands which allow combining flags but every tar tutorial seems to do it from the beginning.

        • barsoap@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          4
          ·
          1 year ago

          tar -xf is not really special combining short options isn’t uncommon.

          Where tar is nonstandard is that you can leave out the -, tar xf is actually how POSIX specifies it. And we’ve kinda come full circle on that one with many modern utilities using a command syntax, you can read tar xf as “tar extract file” just as you can read git pull as, well, “git pull”.

          If you want to see a standard command with truly non-standard syntax have a look at dd.

      • sonnenzeit@feddit.de
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        6
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        Many do as it’s considered good practice, but it’s not guaranteed, it just depends on the individual command (program). Usually you can use the --help option to see all the options, so for instance tar --help.

      • Zangoose@lemmy.one
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        1 year ago

        Most commands will have expanded arguments started with 2 dashes that usually look like ‘–verbose-name-of-option’, they’re usually listed in the man page/documentation along with the abbreviated letter version

    • ExLisper@linux.community
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      arrow-down
      3
      ·
      1 year ago

      They are random letters you have to learn by hard. No one uses the long form. If someone just needs to use it one time they will copy the line from somewhere.