Using getopts in Bash

Question

I want to use getopts in a Bash script as follows:

while getopts ":hXX:h" opt; do
  case ${opt} in
    hXX ) Usage
      ;;
    h ) echo "You pressed Hey"
      ;;
    \? ) echo "Usage: cmd [-h] [-p]"
      ;;
  esac
done

The idea behind is that I want to have two flags -h or --help for allowing user to be able to use HELP in order to be guided how to use the script and another second flag which starts with h but its like -hxx where x is whatever.

How can I distinguish these two since even when I press --hxx flag it automatically executes help flag. I think the order of presenting them in getopt has nothing to do with this.

Surely you can be creative enough to ensure you don't have two options starting with h in a two option script?? — David C. Rankin
– David C. Rankin, Commented Oct 18, 2019 at 6:27
It's not about creativity, it is a specific task which requires this! In addition there are not only two options, i displayed two just for illustration. — asha
– asha, Commented Oct 18, 2019 at 6:28

dash-o · Accepted Answer · 2019-10-18 06:55:58Z

1

The 'external' getopt program (NOT the bash built in getopts) has support for '--longoptions'. It can be used as a pre-procssor to the command line options, making it possible to consume long options with the bash built-in getopt (or to other programs that do not support long options).

See: Using getopts to process long and short command line options for more details.

#! /bin/bash

TEMP=$(getopt -l help -- h "$@")
eval set -- "$TEMP"
while getopts h-: opt ; do
        case "$opt" in
                h) echo "single" ;;
                -) case "$OPTARG" in
                        -help) echo "Double" ;;
                        *) echo "Multi: $OPTARG" ;;
                esac ;;
                *) echo "ERROR: $opt" ;;
        esac
done

edited Oct 18, 2019 at 6:55

answered Oct 18, 2019 at 6:22

dash-o

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