Vladimir Prus wrote:
Neal D. Becker wrote:
It's a small point, but here's my opinion. You say something like: "If option requires a value and following -<number> doesn't match an option, then parse it as an argument".
I would suggest "If option requires a value then parse *any* following string, including -<number> as a value, unconditionally".
So the different would be that
-a -b
where both "a" and "b" are allowed option and "-a" requires a value, will be reported as invalid value of option "-a" not as missing value on the command line? Why do you think that's better?
There are 2 choices: 1) Don't correctly parse some correct cases or 2) Give confusing error message for incorrect case. You'll agree #2 is better than #1. So: -a -3 where -3 is a valid option, and -a takes a value. I suppose if you decide it's better to parse -3 as an option, then you do have a workaround: -a=-3 I'm not sure what gnu getopt does in this case (although it seems to always do the right thing (TM), because I'm sure I've used this and never noticed a problem).