It is sad that many new command-line parsing libraries don't follow the GNU rules anymore. They more often use "-long". Then users have to figure out whether this means "--long" or "-l -o -n -g". To make command line even more confusing, multiple tools I have used allow spaces in optional arguments (e.g. "-opt1 arg1 arg2 -opt2", where arg1 and arg2 set two values for -opt1). Every time I see this, I worry if I could be misusing these tools. I wish everyone could just follow getopt_long() and stop inventing their own weird syntax.

Yet another tragedy broughtabout by golang (at least in part)! :)

(https://golang.org/pkg/flag/#hdr-Command_line_flag_syntax)

Edit: To be clear, I'm mostly "blaming" Go for re-popularizing this style by a) putting it in the standard library and b) being a widely used programming language; I'm not saying Go came up with this or anything.

(idk about the space separated args tho that's even worse)

hnjst

Cobra (https://github.com/spf13/cobra), which is a pretty popular library for Go CLI applications, behaves more like classical GNU tools. It also offers usage/help autogeneration and autocompletion for popular shells.

Not sure about the relevant point on compact short options syntax as in `tar -xvzf archive.tgz` though... (edit) after a quick & sloppy test it seems to work as expected