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Comment by tomerv | Hacker News Reader

> Honestly, in practice, I've seen many tools that support -help also allow --help and -h for those who have the muscle memory reflex for those, so it's not nearly as problematic.

  $ javac --help
  javac: invalid flag: --help
  Usage: javac <options> <source files>
  use -help for a list of possible options

:-(

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A long time ago I filed a bug with Sun about inconsistent flags on the JDK tooling. As I recall it they fixed the sole specific example that I cited instead of reviewing them all...

Ooh, I think this might have been the one (at least the mention of rmi and MS style paths would be consistent with what I recall working on at the time):

https://bugs.java.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=5083924

Using double -- for long named flags is a GNU-ism. Java came from Sun and so prefers the single dashes.

But "-help" is just "-h -e -l -p" ...

Which is also a gnuism

That's my point - "-help" violates the gnu standard.

That's his point, Sun has nothing to do with Gnu so they are not bound to their "standards".

the point was that that gnu is not a universal standard

“-help” being equivalent to “-h -e -l -p” is not a GNUism. It’s described by POSIX. If a utility takes the options “-a” and “-o something” and uses POSIX getopt(), then these are all equivalent:

    cmd -ao arg path path
    cmd -a -o arg path path
    cmd -o arg -a path path
    cmd -a -o arg -- path path
    cmd -a -oarg path path
    cmd -aoarg path path

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