You mean because it uses foo=bar rather than --foo=bar? I don't know, it's not that weird.

I mean, find uses parentheses for forcing evaluation precedence, e.g. -foo -or \( -bar -and -baz \). That's pretty unusual.

And here's uwsgi https://uwsgi-docs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Options.html with probably hundreds of options by now. It includes conditionals and basically its own scripting language right in the parameters.

Most frustrating part with find is:

     $ find -type f  .
     find: paths must precede expression: `.'

It's like the tool knows exactly what you want to do, but still refuses to do it just because.

In the same vein:

   $ git grep Congrats -i
   fatal: option '-i' must come before non-option arguments

Frustrating.

Apropos that (though a bit OT) : what exactly is the deal with unescaped parantheses in bash?

They just seem to produce a syntax error no matter where I use them. But if they have no purpose, then why not simply treat them as nonspecial characters?

E.g.

  echo hello :-) ;

is invalid syntax, even though it doesn't seem to cause any ambiguities with any other bash syntax features. Why not just allow this and treat it like

  echo "hello" ":-)";

?

ps can also get a prize with its incompatible mixture of BSD (non-hyphenated) and UNIX (hyphenated) options. The letters chosen appear pretty random, too.

since dd was there first (predating "modern" argument conventions) surely it's every other software that's weird /s

As I heard the story, dd's arguments are making fun of IBM OS/360 JCL.