[ILUG] YABQ (yet another bash question)

[Conor Daly]

On Sat, Mar 10, 2001 at 12:35:04PM +0000 or so it is rumoured hereabouts, 
Paul J Collins thought:
> >>>>> "CD" == Conor Daly <conor.daly at oceanfree.net> writes:
> 
>     CD> Using getopts to parse a commend line to a bash script I can
>     CD> read one-letter options ( -o) but not long option names (
>     CD> --option-name).  Can this be done?  Perhaps a case for an
>     CD> option of "-" and then a case construct on $OPTARG to catch
>     CD> the actual option but this requires a manual reading of the
>     CD> next commandline arg and and increment of OTPIND to avoid
>     CD> breaking the (continuing) getopts loop.  There's gotta be a
>     CD> better way eh?
> 
> The way GNU configure scripts do it looks fairly straightforward,
> especially if you don't bother to allow abbreviation of the arguments.

Had a look at a .configure and saw a nice 

-*=*)

case which was all very nice until I looked further down and saw a
gazillion lines of the form 

  -cache-file=* | --cache-file=* | --cache-fil=* | --cache-fi=* \
  | --cache-f=* | --cache-=* | --cache=* | --cach=* | --cac=* | --ca=* | --c=*)
    cache_file="$ac_optarg" ;;

Thinking about it, this just allows abbreviation of the argument and can
be dispensed with.  The seperation of the value from the option is nicely
done with

  case "$ac_option" in
  -*=*) ac_optarg=`echo "$ac_option" | sed 's/[-_a-zA-Z0-9]*=//'` ;;

where $ac_option is what comes in on the commandline though this only
works for long options of the form

--long-option=value
             ^

It will break for 

--long-option value
             ^

Is whitespace usually allowed for long options anyhow?

Incidentally, what is "ac_option"  It seems to hold the commandline
arguments but I can't see where it gets them somewhere in 8k lines of
code.
-- 
Conor Daly <conor.daly at oceanfree.net>

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