Take the 2-minute tour ×  Where did the convention of using
single dashes for letters and doubles dashes for words come from
and why is continued to be used?  For example if I type in ls
--help, you see:    -b, --escape               print octal
escapes for nongraphic characters       --block-size=SIZE
use SIZE-byte blocks   -B, --ignore-backups       do not list
implied entries ending with ~  I tried googling - and --
convention even with quotes with little success.  share|improve
this question add comment  4 Answers  up vote 26 down vote
accepted  In The Art of Unix Programming Eric Steven Raymond
describes how this practice evolved:  In the original Unix
tradition, command-line options are single letters preceded by a
single hyphen... The original Unix style evolved on slow ASR-33
teletypes that made terseness a virtue; thus the single-letter
options. Holding down the shift key required actual effort; thus
the preference for lower case, and the use of “-” (rather than
the perhaps more logical “+”) to