See Conditions for Omitting Switches . Some commands have one or more flags, which specify the manner in which the command interpreter and server process perform the command, or what kind of output it produces. Flags are preceded by hyphens like switches, but they take no values. Although the command descriptions and online help generally list a command's flags after its arguments, there is no prescribed order for flags. They can appear anywhere on the command line following the operation code, except in between the parts of an argument.
Flags are always optional.
The following example illustrates the different parts of a command that belongs to an AFS command suite. The BOS Server executes most of the commands in this suite. This argument specifies the server machine on which BOS Server is to collect and report binary dates. The switch is -file and the values are ptserver and kaserver . It tells the BOS Server not to attempt to authenticate the issuer of the command.