[tex-live] More on multiple minuses

[Zdenek Wagner]

2008/9/5 Philip TAYLOR <P.Taylor at rhul.ac.uk>:
>
> The TeX Live Guide (hereinafter TLG) says
>
>        For full documentation:
>        > tlmgr -help
>
> but being a distrustful soul, I tried
>
>
>        > tlmgr    help
>        > tlmgr   -help
>        > tlmgr  --help
>        > tlmgr ---help
>
> the first three of which appeared to generate
> the same output, and the fourth of which
> diagnosed an error.  Is there any difference
> between the three forms that work, because if
> TLM accepts some of these in only some contexts,
> it will lead to confusion ...
>
tlmgr is written in perl and makes use of Getopt::Long. This is a
small part of quite a long documentation of that package:

Options can have values, the value is placed after the option
character. Sometimes with whitespace in between, sometimes not:

    -s 24 -s24

Due to the very cryptic nature of these options, another style was
developed that used long names. So instead of a cryptic C<-l> one
could use the more descriptive C<--long>. To distinguish between a
bundle of single-character options and a long one, two dashes are used
to precede the option name. Early implementations of long options used
a plus C<+> instead. Also, option values could be specified either
like

    --size=24

or

    --size 24

The C<+> form is now obsolete and strongly deprecated.

Anofher comment of mine: it often works with a single dash, i.e.

-size 24

will work but

-size=24

will not work.


> ** Phil.
>
>



-- 
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz