command line options

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <191 at sdeggo.UUCP> dave at sdeggo.UUCP (David L. Smith) writes:
>There's a basic flaw in this little scheme, why doesn't
>everyone just admit it and come up with a better idea?

There is NOT a basic flaw in the scheme; I use it all the time
and it works much better than the suggested alternatives (which
DON'T WORK AT ALL because they are not currently implemented!).
Note that I didn't have to do anything to have this feature
available; it's already there.  I thought you might like to hear
about it so as to be able to exploit it, but feel free to not
use it while you work on some grandiose scheme that practically
nobody will adopt (as Henry has pointed out).

If you think the existence of shell metacharacters is a "basic
flaw", well perhaps it is if you plop naive users in front of
a terminal running a raw Bourne shell or csh.  They were not
intended to serve as naive-user interfaces.  Somehow I don't
have trouble with this even when using the -? trick.