by Morgan Aldridge morgant@makkintosshu.com
This is the stub I use for creating new command line tools using bash. It's always evolving.
Main features include:
- Informational comment heading
- Parsing command line options & arguments, incl. support for:
- Single options (e.g. "-h")
- Single options specified together (e.g. "-tzf")
- GNU-style long options (e.g. "--help")
- GNU-style long options using alternate value format (e.g. "--dry-run=off")
- Help, version, and verbose options
getopt & getopts can greatly simplify parsing command line options & arguments, but both have limitations that I don't want to be stuck with. I'd like to have the best of both options, plus additional features, and I've been able to get that by rolling my own options & argument parsing.
getopt supports single options (e.g. "-h"), single options specified together (e.g. "-tzf"), and GNU-style long options (e.g. "--help"), but doesn't support white space in arguments, even when escaped, on many platforms. Many (all?) versions of Mac OS X are afflicted by this, plus Mac file systems have always supported spaces in file names, greatly increasing the likelihood of running into that limitation.
getopts supports quoted arguments, but does not support GNU-style long options (e.g. "--help"). While long options can be lived without, I find that they help further clarify a tool's documentation and make it easier to test & troubleshoot a tool's various options with fewer mistakes.
Copyright (c) 2012, Morgan Aldridge All rights reserved.
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