### 2.5 All about command options
-Let’s take a brief break from exploring Mercurial commands to discuss
+Let’s take a brief break from exploring git commands to discuss
a pattern in the way that they work; you may find this useful to keep
in mind as we continue our tour.
-Mercurial has a consistent and straightforward approach to dealing
+Git has a consistent and straightforward approach to dealing
with the options that you can pass to commands. It follows the
conventions for options that are common to modern Linux and Unix
systems.
- * Every option has a long name. For example, as we’ve already seen,
- the “hg log” command accepts a --rev option.
- * Most options have short names, too. Instead of --rev, we can use
- -r. (The reason that some options don’t have short names is that
- the options in question are rarely used.)
- * Long options start with two dashes (e.g. --rev), while short
- options start with one (e.g. -r).
- * Option naming and usage is consistent across commands. For
- example, every command that lets you specify a changeset ID or
- revision number accepts both -r and --rev arguments.
-
-In the examples throughout this book, I use short options instead of
-long. This just reflects my own preference, so don’t read anything
-significant into it.
+ * Most options have long names. For example, as we’ve already seen,
+ the “git log" command accepts a --max-count=<number> option.
+ * Some options have short, single-character names. Often these are
+ aliases for long commands, (such as "-n <number>" instead of
+ --max-count=<number>), but sometimes the option exists in
+ short-form with no long-form equivalent, (such as -p). [XXX: It
+ wouldn't hurt to fix this by adding --patch, etc. right?]
+ * Long options start with two dashes (e.g. --max-count), while short
+ options start with one (e.g. -n).
-Most commands that print output of some kind will print more output
-when passed a -v (or --verbose) option, and less when passed -q (or
---quiet).
+ * Option naming and usage is consistent across commands. For
+ example, every command that lets you specify a commit identifier
+ or range will accept the same expressions, (HEAD~3,
+ origin..master, 72d4f10e, etc), while any command that can be
+ limited by paths will accept the same expressions ("-- doc/
+ some-file.c"), etc.
+
+Many commands that print output of some kind can be made more quiet by
+passing the -q or --quiet options.
### 2.6 Making and reviewing changes