Are there any naming conventions for command line arguments?

Question

Am reviewing a command line driven Java application with command line switches in lower camel case like this:

myapp aSwitch anotherSwitch aThirdSwitch

Am thinking all lower case and leading hyphens may be preferable:

myapp -aswitch -anotherswitch -athirdswitch

...or perhaps:

myapp -a-switch -another-switch -a-third-switch

But struggling to come up with a compelling justification. Would like to follow current conventions and be cross-platform compatible at least for Windows/Linux.

Grateful for advice on what is the most commonly used convention out of these three - and any good reasons for this.

Answer 1

Apache Commons CLI has a description of the commonly used convention. it is also a good parser for such use cases