What’s the difference betwen the single dash and double dash flags on shell commands?

I’m new to working in the shell and the usage of these commands seems arbitrary. Is there a reason one flag has a single dash and another might have a double dash?

A single dash can be followed by multiple single character flags. A double dash prefixes a single, multicharacter option. For example:

tar -czf

That is three different options: c, z, and f. Compared to:

tar --exclude

The double dash makes disambiguates whether it is “exclude” or e, x, c, l, u, d, e combined.

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