Right, but if you don’t already know what those arguments mean, then its not exactly super obvious as to what they do.

For example, I’ve been told that you’re generally not supposed to do pacman -Syyu because it can result in partial upgrades (unless I’m remembering the wrong set/combination of flags, which would just be case in point…) - I tend to remember flags by associating them with words.

For example, the common flags for tar was brought up in one of the sibling comments here, but at least I can remember them by:

• x: eXtract
• z: Use gzip for the operation (which originally I remembered as “the file has .gz” in its extension before I knew what gzip was)
• v: verbose, giving the details about what its doing
• f: file, the file name you’re wanting to work with
• c: create archive
• t: test archive (I use this with the v flag to see what is in an archive before extracting it)

But with Pacman, even after using it on and off for a couple of years, I can try to estimate what the flag names are, but have no idea if its right without double checking:

• S: Sync with repositories
• s: No idea on this one
• y: Also no idea on this one
• Q: Query (search)
• u: Allow upgrades (?)

Really I think its the fact that some of the flags can be used in different combinations which have different effects - like passing z to tar doesn’t change the effect of the flag whether you use x or c. Yet apparently -Syyu and -Syu are valid but one does a proper supported upgrade, and one does a partial upgrade which is not supported and is generally not recommended unless you know what you’re doing. I also know of no occasion where passing the same flag to tar multiple times mutates its behavior as well.

That makes it feel like an anti-pattern to me, similar to using magic numbers in programming. Maybe there is a valid reason for this decision (such as why the Linux kernel uses magic numbers in syscalls) but the result is still that it feels incredibly foreign to me, despite having 10 odd years of Linux experience under my belt.