Not sure what form of documentation you are trying to look at there, but here I just do "man sox" and it pops up in gory detail. smile The "hyphens" you see are "-" minus signs, as with any other unix command.

Here's the info on that rate option you asked about. My first guess was that 'q' meant "quick and dirty", and l/m/h stood for "low/medium/high", and 'v' was for "very high" (quality). Looks like the man page agrees:

Code:
       rate [-q|-l|-m|-h|-v] [override-options] RATE[k]
              Change the audio sampling rate (i.e. resample the audio) to any given RATE (even non-integer if
              this is supported by the output file format) using a quality level defined as follows:

                                          Quality   Band-   Rej dB   Typical Use
                                                    width
                                    -q     quick     n/a    ≈30 @    playback on
                                                             Fs/4    ancient hardware
                                    -l      low      80%     100     playback on old
                                                                     hardware
                                    -m    medium     95%     100     audio playback
                                    -h     high      95%     125     16-bit mastering
                                                                     (use with dither)
                                    -v   very high   95%     175     24-bit mastering

              where  Band-width is the percentage of the audio frequency band that is preserved and Rej dB is
              the level of noise rejection.  Increasing levels of resampling quality come at the  expense  of
              increasing  amounts  of  time to process the audio.  If no quality option is given, the quality
              level used is `high' (but see `Playing & Recording Audio' above regarding playback).

              The `quick' algorithm uses cubic interpolation; all others use band-limited interpolation.   By
              default,  all  algorithms have a `linear' phase response; for `medium', `high' and `very high',
              the phase response is configurable (see below).

              The rate effect is invoked automatically if SoX's -r option specifies a rate that is  different
              to that of the input file(s).  Alternatively, if this effect is given explicitly, then SoX's -r
              option need not be given.  For example, the following two commands are equivalent:
                 sox input.wav -r 48k output.wav bass -b 24
                 sox input.wav        output.wav bass -b 24 rate 48k
              though the second command is more flexible as it allows rate options to be  given,  and  allows
              the effects to be ordered arbitrarily.

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