++options

[maandree]

It would be nice if completion scripts could complete ++options, instead of just --options.
And naturally also short variants.

Preferable, it should be possible to just any character instead of a hyphen and any
number of them instead of one for short and two for long.

[ridiculousfish]

Which commands have ++options? That's a new one for me!

[maandree]

ponysay have it, but I think there are a few others.

This is essentially because it is hard to find sane short options and short
enough long options, by just using --options if you have many similar options.

[maxnordlund]

Another example of this is ghc compiled binaries having +RTS <ghc options go here> -RTS, and the dig DNS tool.

[floam]

+ options are not very uncommon, typically to toggle something the other way - ++option I've never seen!

[krader1961]

I too have never seen ++option. Looking at the ponysay source we can see that it has a custom, idiosyncratic, option parser. I don't think we should bother supporting that. The dig command is also unusual in that its + options are not command flags in the usual sense; they're query options that modify the DNS lookup. Still, it would be nice if that case could be handled more cleanly. Too, as @floam noted, there are commands which use +option prefix to mean the opposite of -option rather than have the user write -nooption.

The question is whether anyone cares enough to implement support for + in addition to -. This issue is four years old which suggests the answer is no.

[krader1961]

Sorry, but I'm going to close this request. The use of + to introduce a flag is sufficiently unusual that we can't justify the work to support it. And ++ is even more unusual and thus even harder to justify supporting it.