A few comments on the CLIP specification. 1. This is a great document, and is definitely needed.
2. I feel that the restriction CLIP imposes on guideline 6 is not a good one. This requires that a short-option that takes an argument must have the option and its argument separated by whitespace. There are many existing programs which use the relaxed form of this guideline, i.e., the argument may immediately follow the option with no whitespace. The effect on users is confusion as how a given command behaves. Also, since it is getopt() that does the actual parsing, there is no way to tell it to behave one way or another, although the specification states that a program can document which way it treats such options. 3. Guideline 16 states that the form "--option=" results in the null string as the argument. This should read "the empty string", and getopt() should behave by returning the empty string. This is because there is no way to indicate a null string if a user uses the short-option. The behavior of <-f ""> and <--filename=> should be the same. Prior usage is that getopt() returning a short-option value always implies that optarg is non-null. To allow optarg to have a null value will break existing applications. This message posted from opensolaris.org
