As far as I can tell, the main difference is that "-" (bare) is considered illegal in the NetBSD setup. I don't have any easy way to test what the difference in "--" is, though long usage would *imply* that it means "end parsing of all arguments here" in the GNU world. OK, i'll see what i can do. ps: about libarch, only alpha, arm, i386 & m68k have "libarch". pps: netbsd/hppa support looks like it's about to arrive :)