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bug#20354: [feature request] ln with command line arguments in reverse o


From: Ma Jiehong
Subject: bug#20354: [feature request] ln with command line arguments in reverse order
Date: Fri, 17 Apr 2015 10:39:53 +0200
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/31.6.0

Hello,

Currently, 'cp', 'mv' and 'ln' share the same basic syntax, that is to say the following:

cp [OPTION]  SOURCE DEST
mv [OPTION] SOURCE DEST
ln [OPTIONS] TARGET LINK_NAME

Which is the same exact rule, and is consistent.

While this is perfect for 'cp' and 'mv', I claim that it shouldn't be the case for 'ln'.

This analysis comes from experience, a discussion from linuxfr.org (French), and also from a design point of view.

These 3 operations are verbs, and we could read those commands as "copy source to destination", "move source to destination" and "link source to destination".

But a big part of the French population at least, would tend to read the link verb as "create a link (named) A pointing on B". This is annoying, because it is quite the opposite, and either people make the mistake and retry, or need to read the "ln --help" each time, or create a way to remember what is the right order, but in the end tend to confuse, and make a mistake too.

Therefore, I would like to offer the possibility to use "ln" with arguments in the reverse order, given an option, say "--reverse-order/-R".

In this case, the command would act like this:
ln --reverse-order LINK_NAME TARGET

This new option would ensure that no script or tool depending on "ln" would break, while allowing some people to use it this way.

Jiehong





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