On: Use long flags when scripting

[fusiongyro]

There's something to be said for the automatic recognition that something like "tar zxvf foo.tar.gz" has, versus the verbose "tar --gzip --extract --verbose --file foo.tar.gz." It feels terribly ponderous to do the latter. That said, when I see a command I don't recognize immediately ('sed -n' comes to mind for some reason) I would benefit from seeing the long option. The other side of the coin is that once I go look up 'sed -n' I'll probably remember it for next time.

[sabraham → fusiongyro]

http://xkcd.com/1168/

[jlangenauer → fusiongyro]

I always remember this as "eXtract Ze Vucking File".

(You have to say it in a bad german accent.)

[ralph → fusiongyro]

Aside,

    sed -n /re/p

is grep. sed's default is to print every line at the end of the script, -n says not to. Larry Wall rightly had perl(1) inherit -n along with perl's -p.