GETOPT(1) | General Commands Manual | GETOPT(1) |
getopt
— parse
command options
args=`getopt optstring $*`; set -- $args |
getopt
is used to break up options in
command lines for easy parsing by shell procedures, and to check for legal
options. [optstring] is a string of recognized option letters (see
getopt(3)); if a letter is
followed by a colon, the option is expected to have an argument which may or
may not be separated from it by whitespace. However, if a letter is followed
by two colons, the argument is optional and may not be separated by
whitespace - this is an extension not covered by POSIX. The special option
‘--’ is used to delimit the end of the options.
getopt
will place ‘--’ in the
arguments at the end of the options, or recognize it if used explicitly. The
shell arguments ($1, $2,
...) are reset so that each option is preceded by a
‘-’ and in its own shell argument; each option argument is
also in its own shell argument.
Note that the construction set -- `getopt
optstring $*`
is not recommended, as the exit value from
“set” will prevent the exit value from
getopt
from being determined.
The following code fragment shows how one might process the
arguments for a command that can take the options -a
and -b
, and the option -o
,
which requires an argument.
args=`getopt abo: $*` if [ $? -ne 0 ] then echo 'Usage: ...' exit 2 fi set -- $args while [ $# -ge 0 ] do case "$1" in -a|-b) flag="$1"; shift;; -o) oarg="$2"; shift; shift;; --) shift; break;; esac done
This code will accept any of the following as equivalent:
cmd -aoarg file file cmd -a -o arg file file cmd -oarg -a file file cmd -a -oarg -- file file
getopt
prints an error message on the
standard error output when it encounters an option letter not included in
[optstring].
Written by Henry Spencer, working from a Bell Labs manual page. Behavior believed identical to the Bell version.
Whatever getopt(3) has.
Arguments containing whitespace or embedded shell metacharacters generally will not survive intact; this looks easy to fix but isn't.
The error message for an invalid option is identified as coming
from getopt
rather than from the shell procedure
containing the invocation of getopt
; this again is
hard to fix.
The precise best way to use the set
command to set the arguments without disrupting the value(s) of shell
options varies from one shell version to another.
October 28, 2010 | OpenBSD-5.1 |