Why can't the following be done: have a standardized superset of flags for the most common and widespread options, such as verbose (-v), version (-V), recursive (-r), all (-a), force (-f).
The GNU Project
does define such a
set of standard options for long options such as --verbose, --version, etc. Of course, there's no hope of completely standardising the wild array of differing interpretations of short options. As others have said: that's fine; trying to do it would constraint lots of utilities, annoy lots of people, and take away some of the fun!
:-)
[Someone else:]
Even better was the approach the Amiga took. It had standardised on a single library to parse all command lines, and allowed you to always know how to get at least the list of arguments to a particular command.
GNU short and long options are always (by sane programmers anyway!) parsed using the
getopt_long library routine. Potentially one day someone will get around to integrating this with readline in some way to get option completion and lists of arguments and all the good stuff the dear old Amiga had.
