Question

Greetings to my revered experts!

I’m writing a command line tool(similar to ls or cat or uname etc) and I was wondering if there’s a best-practice to order the arguments in the usage statement.

I’m confused because, ls‘s usage statement prints arguments in alphabetical order, where as cat‘s usage statement does not!

Try cat --help and ls --help.

Can you refer me to some documentation too, if there is a standard?

Answer 1

Ha, standard! No, certainly nothing like that. Pick your favorite, whichever looks nice and is organized well and is on everyone’s computer already, and mimic it.

My opinions follow:

• I don’t see any value in alphabetical.
• Order it logically, arranged into categories and put useful stuff first.
• Make sure the parsing engine is solid and “standard”, preferably using someone else’s. Boost’s Program Options or Python’s optparse are good if they’re in the right language for you. Most other languages have some too.
• Make sure to include many examples that span the gamut of use.