Aaron wrote:
Having written the first versions of getopt(3),
getopt(1), and associated man pages around 1979
...
I wrote getopt, and rewrote many commands to use it
because I got
annoyed at trying to remember which commands required “-x -y -z” vs
“-xyz”, and which flags required or allowed optional arguments.
For posterity, can you tell us more about where/when/how it happened?
Where were you working, and on what project??
I found an acknowledgement of your work on p9 of the paper that starts at
https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/AUUGN/AUUGN-V05.3.pdf#page=27
"Proposed Syntax Standard for UNIX* System Commands":
Acknowledgments
We are indebted to Jerry Vogel and Aaron Cohen: after
evaluating the problem, we arrived at asolution very similar
to the one they championed five years ago.
References for the above proposal:
Hemenway, K., & Armitage, H. (1984) Proposed Syntax Standard for UNIX System
Commands. In Summer USENIX Conference. El Cerito, CA: Usenix Association.
Proposed syntax standard for UNIX system commands
K Hemenway, H Armitage - UNIX/world, 1984