Difference between terms: “option”, “argument”, and “parameter”?

Question

What are the differences between these terms: \"option\", \"argument\", and \"parameter\"? In man pages these terms often seem to be used interchangeably.

Answer 1

Since the question is tagged "bash", I looked for relevant sections in the Bash manual. I list these as quoted passages below together with my own one sentence summaries.

Arguments

Everything following the command is an argument.

A simple shell command such as echo a b c consists of the command itself followed by arguments, separated by spaces.

A simple command is the kind of command encountered most often. It’s just a sequence of words separated by blanks, terminated by one of the shell’s control operators (see Definitions). The first word generally specifies a command to be executed, with the rest of the words being that command’s arguments.

Parameters

Arguments are referred to as parameters during function execution.

When a function is executed, the arguments to the function become the positional parameters during its execution

A parameter is an entity that stores values. It can be a name, a number, or one of the special characters listed below. A variable is a parameter denoted by a name.

A positional parameter is a parameter denoted by one or more digits, other than the single digit 0. Positional parameters are assigned from the shell’s arguments when it is invoked, and may be reassigned using the set builtin command. Positional parameter N may be referenced as ${N}, or as $N when N consists of a single digit.

Options

There is no dedicated section to defining what an option is, but they are referred to as hyphen-prefixed characters throughout the manual.

The -p option changes the output format to that specified by POSIX