I know that these two commands do the same thing:
ls -la
ls -al
but I'm wondering if there is any preference between them. Is it better practice to order them in a certain way?
It does not really matter* unless a command explicitly mentions. I have came across no reference that gave anything like a guideline how to put the options one after another. So I think for the sake of readability the options can be arranged alphabetically.
*There is a very very important cavaet that is if any option needs a filename or any other input right after it you need to put it accordingly.
For example, the -f option of grep takes a file as input to take the pattern to look for from the input file. You need to give the command as e.g.:
grep -cf input.txt file.txt
If you use it like:
grep -fc input.txt file.txt
it will fail as it will use c as a file name.
