[Tutor] What are all those letters after terminal commands?

[Cecilia Chavana-Bryant]

Hola,

I'm going through the 'Command line crash course' by Zed Shaw, thanks to
the people that recommended this book, its quite a good course, I can see
what the author was going for with the title but if it wasn't for your
recommendations, it would have put me off. At the beginning of Chapter 8 -
Moving around (pushd, popd) on Source: 13 exercise 8 I found this command:
mkdir -p i/like/icecream. I am guessing that the -p stands for directory
path? I have seen other such letters sometimes with or without the ' - '
before them (I think) in commands so my question is, what are these letters
for? what are they called? and could someone please point me to where I can
find a list of these with descriptions of what they do. I have tried
googling with no positive results as I don't  know what they are called or
I get just the information for the command they are used with.

Many thanks in advance for the help, Cecilia
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