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[Ruben de Groot]

On Sat, Jun 06, 2009 at 11:49:51AM +0200, Wojciech Puchar typed:
> >>what some single-letter option meant.  I pretty much never use them on
> >>the command line, though.
> >
> >Agreed, the long options *as an alternative* can be descriptive in scripts,
> >tutorials, howto's etc.
> >The other reason often mentioned, there being not enough letters in the
> >alphabet to cover all possible options, in my opinion advocates bloated
> >software (one program can do it all), which goes against the Unix paradigm
> >of making small programs that do one task exceptionally well and just
> >chaining these together.
> you exaggerate a bit.

Maybe :)

> for example rsync does have >26 options but most make sense for program 
> that is dedicated to one task, and it isn't against Unix paradigm.

rsync isn't bloated and it's well written IMO. It still does only one job, and 
it does it well. As you say, most common tasks can still be done with only
short options. This would change if some developer decided to add other,
unrelated functionality. But that's harder if you want to maintain short options
for the common tasks.
Having only long options would place no such restrictions on bloating.

Ruben