-Let’s take a brief break from exploring Mercurial 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 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 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).
+Let’s take a brief break from exploring Mercurial 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
+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 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).