Shhopt was originally written by Sverre H. Huseby, and extended by Bryan Henderson starting in March 2000 for use in Netpbm. Below is the README file from Huseby's package. The file LICENSE.TXT in this directory contains the license (the Artistic License) under which Bryan took and redistributed Shhopt and the license under which Bryan offers the modified Shhopt to others. Bryan made the following changes to shhopt for Netpbm. - OPT_FLOAT (floating point number) data type added - symbols prefixed with "pm_". - pm_optParseOptions2() added. Advantages over pm_optParseOptions(): You can have a syntax where there is no such thing as a short option (e.g. -a. Maybe stacked like -tanp). Then the long options can have either 1 or 2 dashes (e.g. -width or --width). Of course, -w could be an abbreviation of -width; that's not the same thing as a short option. - pm_optParseOptions3() added. Advantages over pm_optParseOptions2(): Tells you whether (how many times, actually) an option was specified - no need to play games with defaults. Also, no need to initialize an option value variable. - optStruct longName changed from char * to const char * to avoid compiler warnings (with -Wwrite-strings) when you assign a string literal to it (which is the normal case). - OPTENTRY/OPTENT3 macros added for declaring the option definition array. - replace isdigit() with ISDIGIT() from Netpbm nstring.h so weird 8-bit characters don't cause incorrect results. - OPT_NAMELIST and OPT_STRINGLIST added. WARNING: pm_optParseOptionsX modify their argv argument (the array of pointers, not the the things to which they point). WARNING: The option values returned by pm_optParseOptionsX for options of type OPT_STRING reside in the program's argument space (the memory addressed by the program's argv array). ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ shhopt - library for parsing command line options. ================================================== This is a set of functions for parsing command line options. Both traditional one-character options, and GNU-style --long-options are supported. What separates this from traditional getopt? -------------------------------------------- This library does more of the parsing for you. You set up a special structure describing the names and types of the options you want your program to support. In the structure you also give addresses of variables to update or functions to call for the various options. By calling optParseOptions, all options in argv are parsed and removed from argv. What is left, are the non-optional arguments to your program. The down-side of this, is that you won't be able to make a program where the position of the options between the non-options are significant. shhopt is distributed under the "Artistic license" (aka. the Perl license), which IMHO gives more freedom than GPL or LGPL. For a copy of the Artistic license, see http://www.opensource.org/licenses/artistic-license.html For more information on Open Source licenses, go to http://www.opensource.org/licenses/ Usage ----- To see how to use this library, take a look at the sample program example.c. A brief explanation: To parse your command line, you need to create and initialize an array of optStruct's. Each element in the array describes a long and short version of an option and specifies what type of option it is and how to handle it. The structure fields (see also shhopt.h): `shortName' is the short option name without the leading '-'. `longName' is the long option name without the leading "--". `type' specifies what type of option this is. (Does it expect an argument? Is it a flag? If it takes an argument, what type should it be?) `arg' is either a function to be called with the argument from the commandline, or a pointer to a location in which to store the value. `flags' indicates whether `arg' points to a function or a storage location. The different argument types: `OPT_END' flags this as the last element in the options array. `OPT_FLAG' indicates an option that takes no arguments. If `arg' is not a function pointer, the value of `arg' will be set to 1 if this flag is found on the command line. `OPT_STRING' expects a string argument. `OPT_INT' expects an int argument. `OPT_UINT' expects an unsigned int argument. `OPT_LONG' expects a long argument. `OPT_ULONG' expects an unsigned long argument. The different flag types: `OPT_CALLFUNC' indicates that `arg' is a function pointer. If this is not given, `arg' is taken as a pointer to a variable. Notes ----- * A dash (`-') by itself is not taken as any kind of an option, as several programs use this to indicate the special files stdin and stdout. It is thus left as a normal argument to the program. * Two dashes (`--') as an argument, is taken to mean that the rest of the arguments should not be scanned for options. This simplifies giving names of files that start with a dash. * Short (one-character) options accept parameters in two ways, either directly following the option in the same argv-entry, or in the next argv-entry: -sPARAMETER -s PARAMETER * Long options accept parameters in two ways: --long-option=PARAMETER --long-option PARAMETER To follow the GNU-tradition, your program documentation should use the first form. * Several one-character options may be combined after a single dash. If any of the options requires a parameter, the rest of the string is taken as this parameter. If there is no "rest of the string", the next argument is taken as the parameter. * There is no support for floating point (double) arguments to options. This is to avoid unnecessary linking with the math library. See example.c for how to get around this by writing a function converting a string argument to a double (functions strToDouble and doubleFunc). Portability ----------- If your libc lacks strtoul, you will need to link with GNU's -liberty, that may be found by anonymous ftp to ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/ The library has (more or less recently) been compiled and `tested' on the following systems: IRIX Release 5.3 IP22 GNU/Linux 2.2.11 SunOS Release 4.1.3_U1 (-liberty needed) ULTRIX V4.4 (Rev. 69) All compilations were done using GNU's gcc, and GNU's make. Author ------ The program is written by Sverre H. Huseby sverrehu@online.no Lofthusvn. 11 B http://home.sol.no/~sverrehu/ N-0587 Oslo Norway You can use and copy this for _free_, but I would be very happy if you send me an E-mail and tell me that you use it. If you insist on paying something, please donate some money to an organization that strives to make the world a better place for everyone. I don't like bugs, so please help me removing them by reporting whatever you find!