• miniu@programming.dev
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    10 months ago

    Why when explaining, giving examples of shell command are people so often providing shortened arguments. It makes it all seam like some random letters you have to remeber by heart. Instead of -x just write --extract. If in the end they endup using the tool so often they need to write it fast they’ll check the shortcuts.

    • catacomb@beehaw.org
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      10 months ago

      I don’t even mind the shortened arguments too much, though it doesn’t help. It’s more that every example seems to smush them together into a string of letters.

      I would have found

      tar -x -f pics.tar ./pics

      to be clearer when I was learning. There’s plenty of commands which allow combining flags but every tar tutorial seems to do it from the beginning.

    • ExLisper@linux.community
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      10 months ago

      They are random letters you have to learn by hard. No one uses the long form. If someone just needs to use it one time they will copy the line from somewhere.