I typed arp into Windows CMD and it gave me the options as to what I can do with it.
It gave me arp -a (then gave details) and then it showed arp -g which says 'same as -a'
So what's the point of having two options that do the exactly the same thing? why not deprecate -g and keep -a or vice versa?
1 Answer
Most likely the -g remains for compatibility with certain older versions.
Note that arp and various other tools were originally imported from BSD, along with the entire TCP/IP stack. The BSD arp command uses -a. (So does the SunOS one, apparently.)
It is possible that either the -a in Windows arp was accidentally changed to -g, then changed back, or that some other operating system used arp -g for the same task.
