Re: bash manual on interactive shell

[Lawrence Velázquez]

On Sun, Dec 12, 2021, at 9:03 PM, Mallika wrote:
> I'm a little confused about how all the and's and or's combine (I suppose
> it's obvious if you're a little more familiar with the material - but it
> would be great if it were possible to express this by indentation),

It's a relatively confusing state of affairs.  An unordered list
might help.

> but I'd actually decided to write in just to clarify that first line:
> "started without non-option arguments,"
>
> Does "option arguments" mean "option*al* arguments"?

No.  While all option arguments happen to be optional, not all
optional arguments are options.

An "option argument", roughly speaking, is an argument that begins
with one or two hyphen-minuses and affects the configuration of the
invoked shell.  They are described here:

https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Invoking-Bash.html

> If the double-negative* is *actually correct, wouldn't the same sentiment
> be expressed by "started with only option(al?) arguments"? Double-negatives
> are inherently confusing, so it would be helpful to avoid them.

Something like "with only option arguments" could easily be
misunderstood as "with one or more option arguments".

-- 
vq