The Growth of Command Line Options, 1979-Present

DannyB writes:

The growth of command line options, 1979-Present

The first of McIlroy's dicta is often paraphrased as "do one thing and do it well", which is shortened from "Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new 'features.'" [ . . . ]

If you open up a manpage for ls on mac, you'll see that it starts with

ls [-ABCFGHLOPRSTUW@abcdefghiklmnopqrstuwx1] [file ...]

That is, the one-letter flags to ls include every lowercase letter except for {jvyz}, 14 uppercase letters, plus @ and 1. That's 22 + 14 + 2 = 38 single-character options alone.

On ubuntu 17, if you read the manpage for coreutils ls, you don't get a nice summary of options, but you'll see that ls has 58 options (including --help and --version).

To see if ls is an aberration or if it's normal to have commands that do this much stuff, we can look at some common commands, sorted by frequency of use.

(see article for interesting table.)

Read more of this story at SoylentNews.