Maybe I live under a rock, but I feel like command line utilities taking environment variable arguments just isn’t that common of a practice? The only examples I can think of are when an argument is more of a “global variable” that many different commands may find useful such as JAVA_HOME, GITHUB_TOKEN, etc. For web applications and docker containers, environment variables fit easily into the deployment process and for all intents and purposes, are pretty much static.
>Maybe I live under a rock, but I feel like command line utilities taking environment variable arguments just isn’t that common of a practice?
Nope, it's quite common. Many standard UNIX cli utilities take some environment variables (including things like LOCALE). Also common in scripts, setting up programming languages paths, etc.
It's also not a bad practice, contrary to what the author says.
These are good examples but I think these fit under my “global argument” umbrella. Imagine if every Linux command had a different argument name for the pager?
