For a small flight of fancy, imagine if each program had a --for-docs argument, which causes it to simply spit out the canonical long-form version equivalent to whatever else it has been called with.

Or, a separate program that can convert from short to long form:

> for-docs "ls -lrth /mnt/data"

ls -l --reverse -t --human-readable -- /mnt/data

(I'd put in an option to put the options alphabetically too)

While I'd appreciate that facility too, it seems... even-more-fanciful, as one tool would need to somehow incorporate all the logic and quirks of all supported commands, including ones which could be very destructive if anything went wrong.

Kind of like positing a master `dry-run` command as opposed to different commands implementing `--dry-run` arguments.

I did muck around with using "sed" to process the "man" output to find a relevant long option in a one-liner, so it wouldn't be too difficult to implement.

I did something like this:

  _command="sed" _option="n"
  man -- "${_command}" | sed --quiet --expression  "s/^       -${_option}.*, //p"

Then I realised that a bit of logic is needed (or more complicated regexp) to deal with some exceptions and moved onto something else.

> Finding --silent in curl's docs is easier than reading through every occurrence of -s.

Dumb trick: Search prefixed with 2 spaces.

  man curl
  /  -s

Yields exactly one hit on my machine. In the general case, you may have to try one and two spaces.

Absolutely agree.

The shorthands are for when typing it at a console and the long form versions should be used in scripts.

Aren't there tools for which the short flags are standardized (e.g. POSIX) but the long flags aren't?

agreed. i get if you're great at cli usage or have your own scripts, but if you're publishing for general use, it should be long form. that includes even utility scripts for a small team.

also, putting it out long-form you might catch some things you do out of habit, rather than what's necessary for the job.

Another possible advantage is that I invariably have to check the man page to find the appropriate long-form option and sometimes spot an option that I didn't know about.