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As far as I can tell, switches that use a letter (like -a) only need a dash, but those that use a word, don't. But I have no idea why - probably something from Unix.
They are gnu additions to the options to make some of them clearer. The man pages in Slackware make a distinction between industry standard POSIX options and the gnu ones each being under their own section.
I think additionally that single character options can be strung together on a single '-'.
For example...
tar -xvzf source.tar.gz
instead of (but is functionally the same as)
tar -x -v -z -f source.tar.gz
'--' options are actually single options that are more than one letter.
So...
tar --xvzf source.tar.gz
would actually force the tar program to look for a single option named 'xvzf'.
You can also mix and match, such as
ls -al --co
which will list all (-a) of the contents of the current directory in long (-l) format and apply color (--co) to the display based on the type of file listed on the screen.
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