{"id":28421,"date":"2020-03-19T17:11:54","date_gmt":"2020-03-19T21:11:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=28421"},"modified":"2020-03-19T17:11:54","modified_gmt":"2020-03-19T21:11:54","slug":"the-growth-of-command-line-options","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2020\/03\/19\/the-growth-of-command-line-options\/","title":{"rendered":"The Growth of Command Line Options"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/danluu.com\/cli-complexity\/\">Dan Luu<\/a> (<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/danluu\/status\/1234814736144797697\">tweet<\/a>):<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/danluu.com\/cli-complexity\/\"><p>We can see that the number of command line options has dramatically increased over time; entries tend to get darker going to the right (more options) and there are no cases where entries get lighter (fewer options).<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>If structured data or objects were passed around, formatting could be left to a final formatting pass. But, with plain text, the formatting and the content are intermingled; because formatting can only be done by parsing the content out, it's common for commands to add formatting options for convenience.<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>Over time, more convenience options have been added. For example, to pick a command that originally has zero options, <code>mv<\/code> can move <em>and<\/em> create a backup (three options; two are different ways to specify a backup, one of which takes an argument and the other of which takes zero explicit arguments and reads an implicit argument from the <code>VERSION_CONTROL<\/code> environment variable; one option allows overriding the default backup suffix). <code>mv<\/code> now also has options to never overwrite and to only overwrite if the file is newer.<\/p><\/blockquote>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Dan Luu (tweet): We can see that the number of command line options has dramatically increased over time; entries tend to get darker going to the right (more options) and there are no cases where entries get lighter (fewer options). [&#8230;] If structured data or objects were passed around, formatting could be left to a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"2020-03-19T21:11:57Z","apple_news_api_id":"6194db40-7c89-45e4-b585-cb9df4c86f29","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2020-03-19T21:11:57Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAD\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/w==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/AYZTbQHyJReS1hcud9MhvKQ","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[295,448,30,1666,163],"class_list":["post-28421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-history","tag-linux","tag-mac","tag-macos-10-15","tag-unix"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28421"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28421\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28422,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28421\/revisions\/28422"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}