1 Aug
2021
1 Aug
'21
12:13 a.m.
On Sat, Jul 31, 2021 at 03:04:48PM -0700, Bakul Shah wrote:
On Jul 31, 2021, at 12:20 PM, Jon Steinhart
<jon(a)fourwinds.com> wrote:
That last one is a gotcha waiting to happen:
program --this-is-the-long-option
is the same as
program --this
but that will break scripts (and fingers) when program gets a new
option like
program --this-is-the-even-longer-option
We wrote our own getopt() for BitKeeper and it had long and short options
but no gotcha unique prefix.
So I never got getopt(). One of my rules is that I don't use a library
in cases where the number of lines of gunk that that it takes to use a
library function is >= the number of lines to just write it myself. Yeah,
I know the "but the library has more eyeballs and is debugged" argument
but in reality libraries are the source of many bugs. I've always taken
the approach that I would never hire someone who had to use a library to
implement a singly-linked list.
getopt() is perhaps the wrong solution but consider something like MH,
whose commands all follow a common pattern. Consider:
- options (switches) all start with a single '-'
- they may be abbreviated to a unique prefix.