command line options

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <8041 at elsie.UUCP> ado at elsie.UUCP (Arthur David Olson) writes:
>Moral of the story:  using "-?" to try to get messages sometimes won't work.
>That's why we use "=" here at elsie.

-? always works, but if your shell interprets ? as a metacharacter AND
if you have files with 2-character names starting with -, you're advised
to quote the ? character.

= is the name of a useful file on 8th Edition UNIX, so the same argument
could be made against its use for help, as well as the additional
observation that -? functions as a help request as a serendipitious
side-effect of the design of getopt(), so that it already is supported
and neither applications nor getopt() need to be changed to use it.