Hmm. Actually you prompted me to dig a bit deeper: tar goes all the back to Version 7 UNIX, 1979, but the command line syntax is shared with tap, included in Version 1, man page dated to 1971-11-03. Development of C started 1972. Might’ve been written in B, you’d have to unearth a source archive I bet it’s around somewhere. But anyway if you look through the other Version 1 commands a lot of them don’t take hyphen commands, ls does, e.g. rm doesn’t on account of only taking file names as arguments.
Both BSD and GNU tar take hyphens, I don’t really have any experience with anything else but a short stint with Solaris in the early 2000s (very emphatically before Sun got gobbled up by Oracle) and I don’t remember hyphens tripping me up. Much unlike killall. And I’m apparently not alone in that.
Hmm. Actually you prompted me to dig a bit deeper: tar goes all the back to Version 7 UNIX, 1979, but the command line syntax is shared with tap, included in Version 1, man page dated to 1971-11-03. Development of C started 1972. Might’ve been written in B, you’d have to unearth a source archive I bet it’s around somewhere. But anyway if you look through the other Version 1 commands a lot of them don’t take hyphen commands,
lsdoes, e.g.rmdoesn’t on account of only taking file names as arguments.ddis actually younger, Version 5, 1974, the syntax apparantly comes from IBM’s JCL.Admittedly, that’s all before my time.
Both BSD and GNU tar take hyphens, I don’t really have any experience with anything else but a short stint with Solaris in the early 2000s (very emphatically before Sun got gobbled up by Oracle) and I don’t remember hyphens tripping me up. Much unlike
killall. And I’m apparently not alone in that.