Option parsing standard

Question

I've seen a number of option parsing libraries out there for ruby, but they all come with weird constraints about them.

'executable' gem claims that all command line binaries must have a syntax "binary

'micro-optparse' can't handle trailing list of filenames and requires you have defaults for all non-boolean commands. Strange.

Some other one I used made it impossible to run a command without arguments.

And so on and so on. And I don't want to parse ARGV myself.

Is there anything close to a specification or standard for command line options and arguments? And then what option parsing library complies to that standard?

Have you looked at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/897630/really-cheap-command-line-option-parsing-in-ruby ? — Andrew Grimm, Oct 27 '11 at 22:47

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 27 '11 at 22:06

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Do you know about optparse? It's included in stdlib - as standard as it gets.

But there is no unix standard set in stone as to parsing command-line parameters.

You should define your requirements more clearly and then choose a library that suits them.

answered Oct 27 '11 at 22:06

Leonid Shevtsov

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score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 27 '11 at 21:53

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There's no standard I have ever heard of, but AFAIR Trollop was started out of the frustration with the other command line parsers.

answered Oct 27 '11 at 21:53

Michael Kohl

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score 0 · Answer 3 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:03

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+1 for Michael Kohl's mention of Trollop. Trollop makes it very easy to write command line options that conform to the gnu style.

I wrote a simple self-contained example in How do I make a Ruby script using Trollop for command line parsing?.

edited May 23 '17 at 12:03

Community

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answered Jan 26 '14 at 00:18

fearless_fool

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Option parsing standard

3 Answers3