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From: mjs@hpfcso.FC.HP.COM (Marc Sabatella)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: standard practices
Message-ID: <7340099@hpfcso.FC.HP.COM>
Date: 22 Mar 91 16:41:41 GMT
References: <1991Mar20.204257.26740@convex.com>
Organization: Hewlett-Packard, Fort Collins, CO, USA
Lines: 37

>	-debug		to turn on internal debugging, if any
>	-help		to print a usage synopsis
>	-version	to print current program version
>	-changes	to print major changes since last rev (or indicate
>			that this is first rev)

As others have commented, debug stuff doesn't belong in a released product,
help stuff belongs in a separate "man page" if you really want to be Unix-like,
and "what" or "ident" can report version and change history information.

>does this sound reasonable? i have adopted this myself for both unix and
>TOS. i just wish P1003.2 would say something about this...

It (or else XPG2 and XPG3) does say something about your choice of options:
they are unacceptable.  They bless "getopt" as the means of parsing arguments.
This means "-debug" should be interpreted as "-d -e -b -u -g" if
any (or all?) of "-e", "-b", "-u" and "-g" are defined as options, or else it
could be interpreted as "-d ebug", where "ebug" is an argument to "-d", and
optional arguments are forbidden (ie, either an option takes an argument or it
doesn't).  In general, multi-character options beginning with "-" are frowned
upon.  Instead, use something like

	-A,debug
	-A,help
	...

or

	+debug
	+help
	...

--------------
Marc Sabatella (marc@hpmonk.fc.hp.com)
Disclaimers:
	2 + 2 = 3, for suitably small values of 2
	Bill and Dave may not always agree with me