We are running Linux, a mostly POSIX-compliant OS. POSIX standards it should be: Utility Argument Syntax.
- An option is a hyphen followed by a single alphanumeric character,
like this:
-o
.
- An option may require an argument (which must appear
immediately after the option); for example,
-o argument
or
-oargument
.
- Options that do not require arguments can be grouped after a hyphen, so, for example,
-lst
is equivalent to -t -l -s
.
- Options can appear in any order; thus
-lst
is equivalent to -tls
.
- Options can appear multiple times.
- Options precede other nonoption
arguments:
-lst
nonoption.
- The
--
argument terminates options.
- The
-
option is typically used to represent one of the standard input
streams.