Chris Miller <chris_overseas@hotmail.com> writes:
I in fact called it --output-dir initially. However when I first typed it at the commandline, I caught myself writing --destdir. I realized that --destdir is just the name of the option for a lot of tools when specifying a target directory I'm used to.
It's not my code, it's everyone's :) I don't feel particularly strongly about it and in fact was trying to think of examples of other apps without much success. If you think destdir's more commonly used then that's good enough for me.
destdir is typically used to set a prefix for a filesystem hierarchy that is intended to be moved to be the root filesystem on some other system, and typically used in cross compiling. For a data manipulation program I think --output-dir is more likely to be understood by a broader audience. Either way, it's definitely a nice feature.