With long options, both `--opt=arg' and `--opt arg' are valid constructs.
I could have sworn that I just tried that and it didn't work for me! Users must always think first, that's a good rule :^) That's not a problem. :-) The problem with `-c', as I see it, is that we are changing the behavior of a traditional option that was in ping from the days of its inception and many people had already made their habits of using it. While this is sometimes a good reason to stick with currennt behaviour, it is sometimes better to break old behaviour to make things better. Think of `sort -2' etc, which had also been there since inception, but that was deprected. Instead of changing the `-c' behaviour we can simply introduce a new option that will cause ping to stop after the default number of packets. FWIW, the `-C' letter is still unused in ping, so we can use it for that purpose. This will make for a good mnemonics. The corresponding long option might be more verbose, say `--default-count'. What do you think? While this is a good middle ground, I am not 100% convinced, I still feel that breaking `-c N' is OK. The immediate problem I see is if we decide to remove -C at a future date, it will break more than this change. But I'll sleep on it. What are your thoughts on a BSD_ME_HARDER enviroment variable? We could leave it on by default, and if you set it to nil, then you would get GNUish behaviour.
