alt Hacker NewsEqually I don't like how many instructions and scripts everywhere use shorthands.
Sometimes you see curl -sSLfO. Please, use the long form. It makes life easier for everybody. It makes it easier to verify, and to look up. Finding --silent in curl's docs is easier than reading through every occurrence of -s.
curl --silent --show-error --location --fail --remote name https://example.com/script.sh
Replies
> Finding --silent in curl's docs is easier than reading through every occurrence of -s.
Dumb trick: Search prefixed with 2 spaces.
man curl
/ -s
Absolutely agree.
The shorthands are for when typing it at a console and the long form versions should be used in scripts.
Aren't there tools for which the short flags are standardized (e.g. POSIX) but the long flags aren't?
agreed. i get if you're great at cli usage or have your own scripts, but if you're publishing for general use, it should be long form. that includes even utility scripts for a small team.
also, putting it out long-form you might catch some things you do out of habit, rather than what's necessary for the job.
For a small flight of fancy, imagine if each program had a --for-docs argument, which causes it to simply spit out the canonical long-form version equivalent to whatever else it has been called with.