@ninjacharlie:

You are kind of wrong.

If your programs have similar flags, you should consider making it an own utility.

One example for this is the option -h: it is used in du, ls and df, but can be abstracted into one
utility (see git.z3bra.org/human).

Of course, this is not always possible. Your examples with -v (for version), -V (for verbose) -h (help, -s (silent) make sense.
But I think that duplication of flags always carries the danger of replicating features.

I heard an interesting idea a while ago, namely that 3 standard files are not enough.
stdin, stdout and stderr all have distinct purposes.

But very often stderr is misused for status information which doesn't have anything to do with errors.

The author gave a proposal of two other standard file descriptors: usrin and usrout, which can be used for user in- and output
while the program is running. If somebody here knows pick(1), he/she knows the truth (pick lets you select the lines that get sent
down the pipeline):

Some ugly hacking with the tty has to be done.

Here is the medium rant (only read the first half, the second one is about images in the terminal): https://medium.com/@zirakertan/rant-the-...45bb29dac8

I liked the first half. The second is totally infected by "Integrate everything."

Edit: also, z3bra is right with everything. As always (sigh).