The reasons I wrote it out is that it's more obvious what it does without looking up the documentation. As a project grows larger and so does the number of tools or options in use, the amount of rare things one needs to "just know" tends to become unmanageable, and the time to decompress a highly compressed representation goes up. This is, what I consider to be by now classic, advice, which I have assumed to be tacit knowledge: https://changelog.com/posts/use-long-flags-when-scripting Discussion: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5164354 (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24518682 (2020) In this particular case, nothing would tell me off the cuff what `-I` is supposed to mean for `grep`. It seems reasonable to be explicit here and avoid the extra round of distraction for readers. This has even more impact on people with less experience (overall or just with the particular tools). No action required now, the change is merged and does its thing. But I suggest considering whether a note on the issue should be added to a document about coding conventions.