Klaatu

Yep, you're right. I live in New Zealand, so I have no idea why I wrote that wrong. Technically, I'm correct if you stand in front of the car looking in. (Make sure the car is not in forward montion at the time)

I agree; the basic concepts of so many commands are really simple, but when you get into all the options they can get really complex. I kinda think a good answer to that conundrum is sensible user feedback; don't just fail gracefully, fail and tell the user why we are failing and suggest a good troubleshooting step.

The other answer, I think, is as you say: be complex, expect the user to read the man page because the user is accempting something more complex than usual, and allow the user to script the thing so that they don't have to remember it. This sounds a little like a cop out; how can you claim intuitiveness if your solution is "figure it out and then script it"? but then again, repetitive operations, no matter how intuitive, should be scriptable; that's just a sign of being user friendly.

Either way, I'm going to take a good look at mount and see if I get any ideas from it. It's a command I use often but not for terribly complex operations, so thanks for the reference.