11.1. Commands and Utilities

An LSB conforming implementation shall provide the commands and utilities as described in Table 11-1, with at least the behavior described as mandatory in the referenced underlying specification, with the following exceptions:

1. If any operand (except one which follows --) starts with a hyphen, the behavior is unspecified.

   Rationale (Informative): Applications should place options before operands, or use --, as needed. This text is needed because, by default, GNU option parsing differs from POSIX, unless the environment variable POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. For example, ls . -a in GNU ls means to list the current directory, showing all files (that is, "." is an operand and -a is an option). In POSIX, "." and -a are both operands, and the command means to list the current directory, and also the file named -a. Suggesting that applications rely on the setting of the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable, or try to set it, seems worse than just asking the applications to invoke commands in ways which work with either the POSIX or GNU behaviors.

Referenced Specification(s)