Are there standards for Linux command line switches and arguments?

Question

This is more about the invocation of a program, than any language or parser (though I\'m sure choice of parser library can depend on this). See, I\'ve used a lot of Linux co

Answer 1

The Linux/GNU command line interface follows the POSIX standard. This is noted by GNU in their standards: http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Command_002dLine-Interfaces.html.

Command line syntax is also part of the Single Unix Specification, though --long-options are a GNU innovation IIRC.

See here: http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/7908799/xbd/utilconv.html

But yes, this standard is implemented as getopt.