Command-Line Argument Processing & the Mgetopt Library

摘要

Command-line options represent the 'face" of the program, and tools for options parsing should be convenient and easy to use. For me it was always a tedious job to write the awkward getopt loops, especially in shell scripts. Frankly, I never understood why the getopt function is not designed in the manner of getenv. While libraries such as getopt, getopt_long, popt, and argp are powerful and rich, they don't provide utilities for parsing command options for the shell scripts. With this in mind, I wrote my own getopt library, which I call "mgetopt." I was trying to implement a solution that is equally easy to use in C and shell programs. Mgetopt supports short (see Listing 1), and GNU-style long and longshort options.