installing getnonfreefonts in VirtualBox - Unknown option error

Question

I am have trouble installing the nonfreefonts. When I execute getnonfreefonts -sys -a I get Unknown option: y. If I run for example getnonfreefonts -user --version I get Unknown option: e.

I am almost certain I used the same steps to install the fonts before, but this time I am doing it in a virtual machine - which shouldn't make a difference, but you never know...

My full setup:

• VirtualBox 5.1.26
• Windows 8.1 64 bit as host
• Linux Mint 17.2 64 bit as guest
• GNU bash, Version 4.3.48(1)-release (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)
• TeX Live 2017
• getnonfreefonts, revision 2017-06-02

Any ideas what might cause the error? Am I using the tool wrong or does the bash works incorrectly?

Answer 1

This is samcarter's spot, but the spotter insists it is better to convert my explanation to an answer.

You need, for example,

getnonfreefonts --sys -a 

or

getnonfreefonts --sys --all

as samcarter said. The reason for this is that getnonfreefonts follows the standard shell convention that a single hyphen indicates one or more short, one-letter option(s), while a double hyphen is used for a single, multi-letter option.

If you write -sys, this will be interpreted as if you'd written -s -y -s. But -y is not a recognised option, as the error tells you. Similarly -user means -u -s -e -r but -e is not recognised, as the other error tells you. Moreover, in this latter case, -s probably trumps -u.

The errors are not entirely clear because the usage information produced by --help is incomplete, in that it does not list all short-form options recognised by the command. Looking in the script, -s is an undocumented alternative for --sys and -u for --user. This is why the errors do not complain about -s and -u being unrecognised (rather than -y and -e), as we might have naïvely expected from the usage listing of options.