Re: "Getoptions'" argument syntax

[mikfire]

borris)cat getopt.pl

#!usr/bin/perl -w

use Getopt::Long;
use strict;

GetOptions( "refresh=i", \ (my $refresh = 10 ) );

print "refresh = $refresh\n";

borris)perl getopt.pl
refresh = 10
borris)perl getopt.pl -refresh 5
refresh = 5

Quick experimentation suggests that it provides a default value for an optional parameter. Which is really quite neat, and seems to be completely undocumented.

mikfire

[wog]

... seems to be completely undocumented.

Getopt::Long's documentation does document it, though not directly (emphasis added):

The call to GetOptions() parses the command line arguments that are present in "@ARGV" and sets the option variable to the value "1" if the option did occur on the command line. Otherwise, the option variable is not touched.

It's just a little leap from that that you can take advantage of having an option's variable set before its passed to GetOptions, which is what the odd code given does.