Re: What's cooking in git.git (topics)

From: Miles Bader <miles.bader@necel.com>
Date: Nov 2, 2007, 06:06 UTC
Message-ID: <buofxzp18qp.fsf@dhapc248.dev.necel.com>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LFD.0.999.0711011129460.3342@woody.linux-foundation.org>

Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> writes:

Show 7 quoted lines

> So while you can combine flags for *most* programs, you still won't 
> be able to say things like
>
> 	git clean -qdx
>
> just because that's still a shellscript, and doing any fancy argument 
> parsing in shell is just painful.

Indeed... but for my personal shell scripts I like to use a construct like the following for parsing args:

   while :; do
     case "$1" in
        ... lots of cases to handle normal args ...

       -[!-]?*)
         # split concatenated single-letter options apart
         FIRST="$1"; shift
         set -- `echo $FIRST | $SED 's/-\(.\)\(.*\)/-\1 -\2/'` "$@"
         ;;

       -*)
         # unrecognized option
         unrec_opt "$1"; exit 1;;
       *)
         # non-option
         break;
     esac
   done

I'm sure there are problems with it, but it generally seems to work pretty reasonably for short options.

-Miles

-- 
97% of everything is grunge