Re: override and multiple options

Tim Post wrote:
> Hi Lorenzo,
> 
> On Fri, 2008-12-12 at 11:51 +0100, Lorenzo Bettini wrote:
> 
>> For instance, the -O option can be given many times to the gcc compiler, 
>> and it will decide that only the last one is the one to apply (at least 
>> I think it is like that, in fact, in another program, I was struggling 
>> with a prebuilt command line option to the compiler that couldn't be 
>> changed and this contained -O2 which makes it hard to debug programs: I 
>> then appended -O0 and this solved the problem).
>>
>> I agree with you that this should be stressed in the documentation: I 
>> hadn't written that because I gave it for granted, but that's my mistake :-)
>>
>> any other in the list have opinion about this?
> 
> There are very rare times when I've used one modifier that operates on
> the current optarg each time.
> 
> For instance, a program that splits its logs, taking a -L (--level)
> modifier for each:
> 
> ./foo -f /var/log/foo-panic.log -L3 -f /var/log/foo-normal.log -L1, etc
> 
> However, I have not seen/done this in a really long time. But, in this
> case the value of the last -L passed modifies only the behavior of the
> previous -F option. The kludge needed to make this sane is ugly, I'm not
> sure why someone would do it deliberately unless they had to match what
> existed.
> 
> I would agree with what you wrote as being standard behavior (I think
> POSIX has something to say about it too, I'll try to find the
> reference).

Again, the current behavior lets the application deal personally with 
this case; while overriding multiple options would not make it possible, 
I guess, without using further structures to accumulate options...  I 
think the current behavior is more flexible...

-- 
Lorenzo Bettini, PhD in Computer Science, DI, Univ. Torino
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