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I am redesigning a command line application and am looking for a way to make its use more intuitive. Are there any conventions for the format of parameters passed into a command line application? Or any other method that people have found useful?
I see a lot of Windows command line specifics, but if your program is intended for Linux, I find the GNU command line standard to be the most intuitive. Basically, it uses double hyphens for the long form of a command (e.g.,
--help) and a single hyphen for the short version (e.g.,-h). You can also ‘stack’ the short versions together (e.g.,tar -zxvffilename) and mix ‘n match long and short to your heart’s content.The GNU site also lists standard option names.
The getopt library greatly simplifies parsing these commands. If C’s not your bag, Python has a similar library, as does Perl.