parseargs vs. getopt

[D'Arcy J.M. Cain]

From:  darcy at druid.uucp (D'Arcy J.M. Cain)

In article <742 at longway.TIC.COM> std-unix at uunet.uu.net writes:
>From:  lezz at codex.uucp (Leslie Giles)
>darcy at druid.uucp (D'Arcy J.M. Cain) writes:
>>   ... You can
>>also initialise the argument list more than once supporting things such
>>as environment default command lines, arguments from files etc mixed
>>with arguments from the command line.  I just posted it recently to
>>alt.sources and I'm interested in getting some feedback on it.
>
>It is also possible to restart getopt() by setting various variables.
>I did this in some code to support defaults, as mentioned above.  If anybody
>wants to know how to do this then you can mail me (I don't have the code in
>front of me at the moment - it'd take time to find it) at...
>
I guess I wasn't clear in that paragraph.  The posting goes into great detail
about this but the main point is not that you can restart your argument
processing but that another set of arguments can be stuffed into the ones
you already have.  It allows for something like the following:  Say you
have a program called foo which takes options a & b with no arguments and
f with an argument "on" or "off".  Perhaps the user normally wants this flag
off but wants to override that default this time.  Also the a flag is always
used.  The .profile has the following line:

foo="-a -f off"

Assume also that there is a file called bar with the following line:

-b

then he calls the program like this:

foo -f on -@ bar file1 -f off file2

Assuming that the program is set up correctly then the effective command
is

foo -a -f off -f on -b file1 -f off file2

Which should process file1 with the flag turned on and file2 with the flag
turned off.  As you can see, The environment variable is stuffed into the
command line between the program name and the first argument and the contents
of the file bar is inserted in the line where the file name appears.  While
it may be possible to do something like that with getopt I imagine it would
not be as simple as with my interface.

-- 
D'Arcy J.M. Cain (darcy at druid)     |   Government:
D'Arcy Cain Consulting             |   Organized crime with an attitude
West Hill, Ontario, Canada         |
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Volume-Number: Volume 20, Number 73