Command Line Arguments

[Adam]

I know I can easily process command line arguments with Getopt::Long or Getopt::Std but I want to work a sort of combination. Is there a better module or should I just do my own dirty work?

To be more specific I have a set of about five or six arguments which have distinct first letters. I want people to be able to use this tool using single letter arguments for convenience, but this tool will also be called by other scripts, and those I want to have use the longer, self documenting, arguments. Any ideas? Suggestions?

[ZZamboni]

Getopt::Long can have single-letter aliases for the long arguments. You separate the aliases with "|" in the argument specification. So for example if you say:

GetOptions('copies|n=i' => \$copies);

You will be able to use all of:

-n 5
--copies=5
--copies 5

as arguments.

--ZZamboni

[Adam]

Thats cool. I didn't see that in the documentation. Sigh. I already wrote my own function to parse the command line aliasing the commands with single chars and allowing the grouping of single chars so you can say -bc instead of -b -c. That was this afternoon while PM was down. Now I don't know if I want to go back and replace that with Getopt::Long... We'll see. Plus my parser recognizes '/' as an alternative parameter lead in addition to '-'... sigh.

Thanks ZZamboni

[chip]

FYI, rolling your own Getopt::Std might look like:

while (@ARGV) {
    $_ = $ARGV[0];
    last unless s/^-//;
    shift;
    last if /^-$/;
    while (length) {
        if (s/^a//)        { ++$aflag }
        elsif (s/^b(.*)//) { $bflag = length($1) ? $1 : shift }
        else { die "Unknown flag(s): -$_\n" }
    }
}

[gryng]

Also -n5 works as well.

(Ok I admit it, I'm only writing this for the experience point! no no.. don't, don't hit that negative radio button! Ahhh!)

Afterall, I did read the entire Getopt::Long manual before I posted this to see if there was anything else useful for Adam. There were quite a few new features implemented since I last read it, it's quite -kewwwl- (as Eric Cartman would say).

-Gryn

[PipTigger]

I like your honesty. Quite a virtue of a PerlMonk. =) Shalom.

-PipTigger

p.s. The Legend Will Never Die!

[hel0]

I would do something like this:

my %ArgumentState();
foreach (@ARGV) {
SWITCH: for ($_) {
    /^a/i   && do { $ArgumentState{'foo'}='bar';  last; };  
    /^b/i   && do { &Do_something_here;           last; };
    };
};

But it's all just a matter of personal preference I guess. I don't like creating objects for simple things like parsing the commandline. Regular expressions will also offer you much greater flexibility! Hel0