{"id":4779,"date":"2020-09-30T22:00:12","date_gmt":"2020-10-01T02:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ikriv.com\/blog\/?p=4779"},"modified":"2020-10-02T01:16:25","modified_gmt":"2020-10-02T05:16:25","slug":"the-growth-of-command-line-options-1979-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ikriv.com\/blog\/?p=4779","title":{"rendered":"The growth of command-line options: 1979-2017"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I stumbled upon an article (<a href=\"https:\/\/danluu.com\/cli-complexity\/\">https:\/\/danluu.com\/cli-complexity\/<\/a>), that explores the dramatic growth of the number of command line options in most popular Unix commands between 1979 and 2017 and explains why it may have happened. I found it very interesting and instructive to read.<\/p>\n<p>I am personally a big fan of &#8220;do one thing and do it well&#8221; phylosophy, but I concur that it does not always work. E.g. I am really grateful for <code>grep -r<\/code> for recursive &#8220;find in files&#8221; option, so I don&#8217;t have to write something like <code>find . -type f | xargs grep<\/code>.<\/p>\n<p>I was also unpleasantly surprised by behavior of <code>git blame<\/code> mentioned in the article: it turns out that <code>git blame -C -C<\/code> means &#8220;dig deeper in history than <code>git blame -C<\/code>, and <code>git blame -C -C -C<\/code> means &#8220;dig even deeper&#8221;. This is not how options usually work in Unix, I would expect something like <code>git blame -C 2<\/code>  or <code>git blame -C --deep<\/code>.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/danluu.com\/cli-complexity\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/ikriv.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/09\/commandlines.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"332\" height=\"839\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-4785\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I stumbled upon an article (https:\/\/danluu.com\/cli-complexity\/), that explores the dramatic growth of the number of command line options in most popular Unix commands between 1979 and 2017 and explains why <a href=\"https:\/\/ikriv.com\/blog\/?p=4779\" class=\"more-link\">[&hellip;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"Layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["entry","author-ikriv","post-4779","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-hack"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ikriv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ikriv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ikriv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ikriv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ikriv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4779"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/ikriv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4779\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4788,"href":"https:\/\/ikriv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4779\/revisions\/4788"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ikriv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ikriv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ikriv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}