[Tutor] What are all those letters after terminal commands?

[William Ray Wing]

On Aug 23, 2012, at 9:18 AM, Cecilia Chavana-Bryant <cecilia.chavana at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hola,
> 
> I'm going through the 'Command line crash course' by Zed Shaw, thanks to the people that recommended this book, its quite a good course, I can see what the author was going for with the title but if it wasn't for your recommendations, it would have put me off. At the beginning of Chapter 8 - Moving around (pushd, popd) on Source: 13 exercise 8 I found this command: mkdir -p i/like/icecream. I am guessing that the -p stands for directory path? I have seen other such letters sometimes with or without the ' - ' before them (I think) in commands so my question is, what are these letters for? what are they called? and could someone please point me to where I can find a list of these with descriptions of what they do. I have tried googling with no positive results as I don't  know what they are called or I get just the information for the command they are used with.
> 
> Many thanks in advance for the help, Cecilia
> _______________________________________________
> 
Those letters are options (sometimes called switches) and they modify the action of the command. Thus "$ ls" gives you a very terse list of the files in a directory.  $ ls -a gives you a list of all the files, including invisible ones.  $ ls -l gives you a long list that includes size, date, and protections.  And $ ls -al does both. If you open a terminal session and enter $ man ls<return>, you will get the "man page" for the ls command that will document these and several others. 

Don't worry you're doing great..
Bill
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