What are the basic arguments every good CLI application must have?

Question

myapp /?

myapp -help

myapp -ver

etc....

Answer 1

GNU Coding Standards mandate --version and --help and I've come to expect any CLI program to support these. Other than that, it really depends on what the program is, but here are some other suggestions: -q or --quiet for less output, -v or --verbose for more output, -d or --debug for debugging output.

Answer 2

It depends on the platform.

On Windows, /? or /h or /help are common.

On Unix, a command should have a man page.

On Unix variants in which Gnu conventions are followed (e.g. Linux), it should respond to --help and --version. Even better, it can integrate with bash autocompletion.

Apart from that, look at other programs' in the same area as yours and use the same options where it makes sense. E.g.:

• -r/--recursive to recurse down directories
• -q/--quiet to suppress output
• -v/--verbose to generate verbose, diagnostic output
• -n to execute without changing anything

If your program accepts file names as arguments then common convention is for a single hyphen to mean 'read from stdin' and a double hyphen to mean 'treat the next argument as a file even if it begins with a hyphen'.

Answer 3

A short and long version of command line arguments. Check if there is a getopt library port for the programming language that you use. It will help you in parsing command line arguments.

--config-file=FILE | -C FILE
--help | -h
--usage | -u
--version | -v

Include other relevant options for your application.