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I would argue (at the risk of being down-voted) that if you are scripting tools then it is important to use the long option, not just because future-you might f

I would argue (at the risk of being down-voted) that if you are scripting tools then it is important to use the long option, not just because future-you might forget what the options are (relevant XKCD http://xkcd.com/1168/ http://xkcd.com/1168/), but also for searchability, it's rather difficult in almost any engine (except the wonderful new code-orientated ones that are cropping) up to search for `-xvzf`, but rather simpler to search for `extract verbose zip filename +tar`, for example.

burke 12y ago
That's really what munificent was arguing too though -- that the long-form options are preferable for scripting, but that no one prefers "tar --extract --verbose --compressed --file" to "tar -xzvf" when you just have to extract a file on the command line (in fact, many people don't even bother with the "-", "v", or "z", opting for "tar xf"). This optional brevity is important for utilities.