14.3.1.2 What are options for?

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14.3.1.2 What are options for?

Options are used to provide extra information to tune or customize the execution of a program. In case it wasn't clear, options are usually optional. A program should be able to run just fine with no options whatsoever. (Pick a random program from the Unix or GNU toolsets. Can it run without any options at all and still make sense? The main exceptions are `find`, `tar`, and `dd`--all of which are mutant oddballs that have been rightly criticized for their non-standard syntax and confusing interfaces.)

Lots of people want their programs to have ``required options''. Think about it. If it's required, then it's not optional! If there is a piece of information that your program absolutely requires in order to run successfully, that's what positional arguments are for.

As an example of good command-line interface design, consider the humble `cp` utility, for copying files. It doesn't make much sense to try to copy files without supplying a destination and at least one source. Hence, `cp` fails if you run it with no arguments. However, it has a flexible, useful syntax that does not require any options at all:

    cp SOURCE DEST
    cp SOURCE ... DEST-DIR

You can get pretty far with just that. Most `cp` implementations provide a bunch of options to tweak exactly how the files are copied: you can preserve mode and modification time, avoid following symlinks, ask before clobbering existing files, etc. But none of this distracts from the core mission of `cp`, which is to copy either one file to another, or several files to another directory.