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If you don't like single letter flags, most have options for longer, more descriptive flags that do the same thing. For example, you can either do:

   Make -I dir
or

   Make --include-dir=dir
Choose whichever one makes most sense.


this.

anyone who uses single letter options on a script should be punished.

single letters are for one time typing.


Single letters are sometimes more known than their full option equivalents. Quick, without a man page, what's the short alias for `tar --get` ?


I have no idea because I memorized 'tar zxvf' a long time ago [1] and I have to google everything else.

[1] https://xkcd.com/1597/


I thought you'd post this one https://xkcd.com/1168/


These days tar autodetects zipfiles, and you don't usually need to see the files as they come out, so you can do 'tar xf' instead...


I wouldn't use "--get". If I wanted to use the long option, I'd use "--extract".


Until you find yourself on (Free)BSD, where it doesn't look like the long options are supported: https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?make(1)


It's here: https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=gmake


It depends:

    .
is portable, whereas:

    source
is not... which was a surprise. :)




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