

All external links from news.itsfoss.com articles have that ref parameter added. For example, see the links in this article about the Danish ministry that is switching to LibreOffice.
Edit: This is apparently something that the CMS they use, Ghost, does by default.
The article mentions “GNU getopt” but as far as I know GNU doesn’t have a
getopt
utility; the version on most Linux OSes comes from util-linux. (Perhaps the author is confusing it with the C function with the same name.)Note that other
getopt
implementations have different features and some are simply broken. For example, BSDgetopt
doesn’t support long options and comes with this known bug:For cross-platform scripts it’s probably best to use the
getopts
shell builtin instead, the downside being it only supports fairly basic (POSIX) syntax even on Bash.