Why do people screw around with basic command options?

[christoph at linuxsoup.com (Christoph Doerbeck)]

One of my favorite option "standards" right now is....

    -v  .... could mean verbose, or NOT

example:
fuser -v .... verbose
pkill -v .... NOT (grep style)
 
So, don't go using pkill thinking -v will give nice verbose output.
Fortunately I RTFM, so there is no "story" for me to tell here...

christoph

On Thu, 2006-08-24 at 17:23 -0400, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> On Thursday 24 August 2006 5:04 pm, Gordon Marx wrote:
> > If you're relying on a non-standards-enforced behavior, wouldn't you
> > expect to have something like this happen?
> I've been involved in this stuff for years. One time, when I was responsible 
> for lint on Tru64 Unix, the lint front end script broke because the 
> standards had changed the behavior of sed. Our friend Finnbarr set me 
> straight on this. In the Linux and Unix world we had 2 conflicting Unix 
> standards, SVID and X/Open == now "The Single UNIX? Specification, Version 
> 3. In some cases the behavior of some of the commands were very different, 
> such as PS(1), or CFLOW(1). In our case we have POSIX as well as the LSB. 
> And, as Gordon points out, some old scripts reflect the behavior of 
> utilities that may not have ever been standardized. I've got scripts going 
> back to Ultrix. 
> 
> -- 
> Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
> Boston Linux and Unix user group
> http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
> PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9
> 


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