Use long flags when scripting

Posted Dec 17, 2012 under command-line and programming

1 minute read

I peruse a fair amount of dotfile repos, and keep seeing people use short flags for things like aliases and inside little command line tools. Short flags are a command line shortcut, and they do belong there, but if you're not writing the command in a prompt, do yourself (and anyone else that may someday be reading your code) a favor and be more verbose, because this:

curl --silent checkip.dyndns.org | grep --extended-regexp --only-matching '[0-9\.]+'

is a lot easier for a human to understand than this:

curl -s checkip.dyndns.org | grep -Eo '[0-9\.]+'