Passing options and arguments to your commands is very similar to many CLI commands in an *nix environment. Options are prefixed with a - and can contain one or more options. Some options expect a value to be associated with it. Arguments are string values which aren’t prefixed with -. Let’s look at ls as an example:

ls -r -d OUTGOING -v 12345 will make a verbose listing of node 12345's relationships which have the direction OUTGOING. The node id, 12345, is an argument to ls which tells it to do the listing on that node instead of the current node (see pwd command). However a shorter version of this can be written:

ls -rdv OUTGOING 12345. Here all three options are written together after a single - prefix. Even though the d is in the middle it gets associated with the OUTGOING value. The reason for this is that the ls command doesn’t expect any values associated with the r or v options, hence it can infer that the OUTGOING value refers the d option.