[ILUG] unknown -options vs. GNU getopt(1)?

[Brian Foster]

 I'm writing a wrapper shell script around less(1) for various
 bizarre reasons that are not particularly relevant, and in the
 process of doing so, also experimenting with GNU getopt(1),
 rather than the Bourne-ish shells's builtin getopts(1).

 the issue is there's a handful of -short/--long-options my script
 handles, and everything else (options and filenames) is to be
 passed on to `less'.  this is relatively easy to do with a
 hand-coded argument parser; slightly harder but AFAIK possible
 with the extended `getopts' builtinto the Korn and bash shells
 (but not the basic one in the System V Bourne shell); but does
 not seem possible at all with GNU `getopt'!?

 roughly speaking, GNU `getopt' takes arguments, e.g.:

   -a -bc argC --foo file1 --spam=xyzzy file2

 ...and rewrites them in a quoted canonical form:

   '-a' '-b' '-c' 'argC' '--foo' '--spam' 'xyzzy' '--' 'file1' 'file2'

 ...according to a specification.  in the example above, that
 specification must have said `-a' and `-b' are valueless short
 options, `-c' is a short option which takes a value, `--foo'
 is a valueless long option, and `--spam' is a long option which
 takes a value:

   unset GETOPT_COMPATIBLE POSIXLY_CORRECT
   getopt -o abc: -l foo,spam:  ...

 so far so good.  however, if an unknown option-looking-arg (one
 which starts with a `-') is encountered, I cannot find any way
 of telling GNU `getopt' to treat it as just another string to
 position after the `--' in the rewritten form.  e.g., if `--foo'
 in the above was *not* part of the spec, then I want `getopt' to
 rewrite the arguments to be:

   '-a' '-b' '-c' 'argC' '--spam' 'xyzzy' '--' '--foo' 'file1' 'file2'

 ...but there does not appear to be any way of doing this!??

 am I overlooking something?  (some trick or idiom?)
 or is it that inflexible?  (I'm using «getopt (enhanced) 1.1.2».)
 ideas?  comments?  suggestions??

cheers!
	-blf-
--
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