Linux Tutorial Series – 30 – Long and short command options

Here is the video version, if you prefer it:

When talking about the general command structure:

command -options arguments

I wanted to note that you can have two kinds of options: short options and long options. Long options use two dashes (--) and can’t be chained together, while short options use only one dash and can be chained together. What this means is that if I wanted to display all files in the current directory alongside their long listing, I could write:

ls -l -a

or, shorter:

ls -la

However, long options (one of which we will talk about in the next post) can’t be chained. Just keep that in mind.

Hope you learned something useful!