Hi Lorenzo,
On Fri, 2008-12-12 at 11:51 +0100, Lorenzo Bettini wrote:
For instance, the -O option can be given many times to the gcc compiler,
and it will decide that only the last one is the one to apply (at least
I think it is like that, in fact, in another program, I was struggling
with a prebuilt command line option to the compiler that couldn't be
changed and this contained -O2 which makes it hard to debug programs: I
then appended -O0 and this solved the problem).
I agree with you that this should be stressed in the documentation: I
hadn't written that because I gave it for granted, but that's my mistake :-)
any other in the list have opinion about this?
There are very rare times when I've used one modifier that operates on
the current optarg each time.
For instance, a program that splits its logs, taking a -L (--level)
modifier for each:
./foo -f /var/log/foo-panic.log -L3 -f /var/log/foo-normal.log -L1, etc
However, I have not seen/done this in a really long time. But, in this
case the value of the last -L passed modifies only the behavior of the
previous -F option. The kludge needed to make this sane is ugly, I'm not
sure why someone would do it deliberately unless they had to match what
existed.
I would agree with what you wrote as being standard behavior (I think
POSIX has something to say about it too, I'll try to find the
reference).