Comment by attractivechaos

6 years ago

> for 99% of newer programs, don’t do it

The majority of recent tools in my circle follow this Unix convention. That is a natural result when you use getopt_long().

Right, "don't do it" is imperative mood, not indicative mood. If it were indicative mood, the clause would need a subject but in a casual internet forum I can see why people would omit the subject anyway ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This is one of the reasons why I don't use getopt_long() -- I don't WANT short flags to be combined, for most commands I write. Fortunately, getopt_long() is one of those library functions that is truly trivial to reimplement and not something that has arcane behavior or edge cases.