Moving to using dash ‘-‘ as a delimiter

Spaces or tabs. Using 2 spaces verses 4 spaces. Defining variables as lowercase v InitCap, environment variables UPPERCASE or not, using underscore ‘_’ or dash ‘-‘ as a separator. These are all un-winnable discussions among your friends and colleagues. Side Note: What is critical for any business is there is a well-defined and enforced standard, no matter what that standard it.

I have while scripting in Bash always used underscore ‘_’, for commands or internal functions. I have probably taken on this because environment variables have IMO always used underscore, e.g. looking at my laptop now I have for example (TERM_PROGRAM, TEE_HOME, AWS_DEFAULT_REGION).

However in recent months I have changed my coding practices within scripting to always using the dash ‘-‘. What was list_clusters, became list-clusters for example.

Why? There is just one reason; the bane of millions of effective typists and coders; the QWERTY keyboard. The dash ‘-‘ requires the use of just one finger, while the underscore requires two.

Sometimes the simpler solution is well simpler.

Tagged with: Naming Standards Practices Programming Shell Scripting

Related Posts

Improving container security in your CI/CD pipeline

At PyCon AU 2026 , the presentation Your Python container is 90% stuff you didn’t ask for by Scott Norris at Chainguard really exposed the impact of being lazy in container management for security purposes.

Read more

My take on PyCon Australia 2026

PyCon AU 2026 held in Brisbane this week was a five day event for the Python community. With specialized tracks and dedicated tutorial and engineering days there was a wide variety of content available.

Read more

Fixing Old Software Bugs Without Thinking

I previously came across an issue in my benchmarking work where I relied on the Latency Histogram section of sysbench output. On Linux it worked fine — I generally ran my workload there, so it never mattered.

Read more