Comment by susam

I prefer long options too. However, while writing programs that need to invoke POSIX commands in a portable manner, short options are the only viable choice, as POSIX doesn't specify long options. For instance, see the specification for diff at <https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/utilities/d...>, or that of any POSIX utility listed at <https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/idx/utiliti...>.

That said, this is more of a corner case. In most scenarios, rather than relying on POSIX utilities, there are often better alternatives, such as using library bindings instead of spawning external processes. For example, instead of invoking grep, using something like libpcre could be a more efficient choice.

For non-POSIX utilities like git, hg, rg, ag, etc., using long options makes perfect sense.