Re: Interesting handling of command line arguments

SY> How about '\' to be used in front of a filename that starts SY> with '-'. You mean, escape that with "\\"? Shell escaping/quoting is very inconsistent. Anything that involves single or double quotes or backlashes is just not going to make sense to people on some shell or other. The --option=-value (or --option -value) solution, on the other hand, should make it clear what is intended, and is moderately consistent with the -f or -e options used by many stream processors to escape regexps and the like. O Starts with a dash, it's an option. If it isn't a legal option, XEmacs should quit Why should XEmacs quit? By the time it gets to parsing the options, it has done almost all of the startup work. Why waste that user time? SY> should result in an unknown option error: '-something' (+ SY> appropriate usage help, perhaps with a tip about escaping SY> filenames). xemacs --help produces 43 lines of text. Isn't that better displayed in a buffer, if we're already to the point where we can display buffers? -- Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Ask not how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.