Somewhere I saw a rant against java/javac allegedly using a mix of Windows and U

Question

Somewhere I saw a rant against java/javac allegedly using a mix of Windows and Unix style like

java -classpath ... -ea ... Something
IMHO, it is no mix, it's just like find works as well, isn't it? AFAIK, according to POSIX, the syntax should be like

java --classpath ... --ea ... Something
and -abcdef would mean specifying 6 short options at once. I wonder which version leads in general to less typing and less errors.

I'm writing a small utility in Java and in no case I'm going to use Windows style /a /b since I'm interested primarily in Unix. What style should I choose?

Explanation / Answer

You can find the POSIX argument conventions in the Utility Conventions chapter. The POSIX style consists of options with a single dash followed by a single letter indicating the option, with the argument value separated from the option by a space.

There are exceptions to the rules - find, for example - but these are because of the historical Unix precedents.

The X Windows (X11) uses find-like single-dash, long name options.

The double-dash long name options were pioneered by GNU (after a detour using + as a prefix).

See this StackOverflow question for a discussion of the wide variety of known command line argument handling systems - there are lots. (Since this was written, the powers-that-be decided the question SO 367309 was not a good fit for SO. I've transferred the answer to another question, What is the general syntax of a Unix shell command?.)

You could extend the list of techniques to cover git (and a number of other systems) where you get a structure like:

basecommand [global options] subcommand [sub-command options] [name ...]
There may be many sub-commands, each with its own lexicon of options.

Of course, Windows uses (used) slash '/' to indicate options instead of dash '-'.

JCL (for z/OS, and OS/360, and intermediate systems) tends to use positional parameters separated by commas, and is generally regarded as not being user-friendly or a good interface.

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