What Mick's Leaving Out

Throughout this article I'm using the “long form” of Tripwire commands; any flag or directive beginning with a double dash (--) has a corresponding “short form”. For example, these two commands are equivalent:

twadmin --print-cfgfile
twadmin -m f
Once you've become comfortable using Tripwire, I recommend that you learn to use the short forms. As Neal Stephenson points out in his essay “In the Beginning Was the Command Line”, repetitive stress disorder is to us geeks what black lung is to miners. I'd hate for anyone to think I was responsible for inflicting either on my gentle readers.

Just starting out, however, you'll probably have a much easier time dealing with Tripwire's more English-like long command syntax. The Tripwire Open Source Reference Card (see Resources) has a handy matrix of long-form vs. short-form flags for Tripware executables.