Placement of command line options in bash

Question

I just starting using a Mac and have been frustrated that command line options are required immediately following the command so that this works:

ls -la /usr

but this doesn't:

ls /usr -la

ls: -la: No such file or directory

Is there any way to change this? Or can someone tell me why the placement of options is agnostic on most Linux platforms, but not on Mac?

Answer 1

Linux uses GNU tools. OS X uses BSD tools. BSD tools are far more picky about order and presence of command line arguments.

Answer 2

Command line processing is determined in a source code of the program that became a specific command.

More often than not, a bunch of commands use a specific command line processing library (GNU getargs, or in case of Perl scripts GetOpts::Long are examples of such), though whether the command line processing was hand-rolled or used any specific library is entirely dependent on the command.

Therefore the abilities of command line processing (e.g. support for reordering, use of -- to delineate end of flags, folding of -a -b into -ab, etc...) depend entirely on the source code of individual apps and/or the libraries they use.

The specific pattern you noted is probably due to differing command line processing libraries (or individual hand-rolled arg processing code used by developers) between Linux with its GNU roots and OSX (IIRC, BSD origins but not sure)

Answer 3

The reasons is likely in the command line processing libraries but if I had to guess the motivation of the strict ordering libraries it is to impose consistency. First named parameters then positional parameters. Once consistency is imposed it makes command lines easier to parse mentally.