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Re: Two-letter options?

From: Rainer Canavan via curl-users <curl-users_at_lists.haxx.se>
Date: Fri, 11 Mar 2022 11:25:51 +0100

On Fri, Mar 11, 2022 at 10:38 AM Daniel Stenberg via curl-users
<curl-users_at_lists.haxx.se> wrote:
>
> Hello!
>
> Over on Twitter, Leah Neukirchen brought an interesting idea for curl command
> line options.
>
> We have basically run out of single-letter options (practically speaking only
> -W, -5, -7, -8, -9 are left usused), making all new options forced to be long
> versions only. Like the newly introduced --remove-on-error [1].
>
> The proposal is that we "repurpose" using *two* boolean single-letter options
> and give them a unique meaning. For example, we can make "-ff" to mean
> something, or "-ss", "-aa" etc.

I'm not sure if your proposal would be limited to double letter options that are
provided in isolation, or if those could also be concatenated to a
single option, i.e.
if "-k -ff -v" would be the same as "-kffv". If that's not the
intended behavior, why
not just use "--ff" with no risks/limitations regarding backwards compatibility?

Alternatively, using just one additional letter would abbreviate
--remove-on-error to --roe,
which might be easier to remember.

Rainer
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Received on 2022-03-11