Conventions

As it is just a String[], you can interpret the arguments passed to your program in any way you choose.

What you will notice, however, from using other tools in your terminal is that there are a few socially accepted conventions.

If your tool takes "options" then you would expect --option-name VALUE to be how you specify it. So two dashes followed by the argument name.

If you need a shorter version then you allow for one dash and sometimes a single letter value -d VALUE.

And most importantly, if someone types --help you should give them the available options. Try java --help for an example.