Using getopts to process long and short command line options

Question

I wish to have long and short forms of command line options invoked using my shell script.

I know that getopts can be used, but like in Perl, I have not

Answer 1

I don't have enough rep yet to comment or vote his solution up, but sme's answer worked extremely well for me. The only issue I ran into was that the arguments end up wrapped in single-quotes (so I have an strip them out).

I also added some example usages and HELP text. I'll included my slightly extended version here:

#!/bin/bash

# getopt example
# from: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/402377/using-getopts-in-bash-shell-script-to-get-long-and-short-command-line-options
HELP_TEXT=\
"   USAGE:\n
    Accepts - and -- flags, can specify options that require a value, and can be in any order. A double-hyphen (--) will stop processing options.\n\n

    Accepts the following forms:\n\n

    getopt-example.sh -a -b -c value-for-c some-arg\n
    getopt-example.sh -c value-for-c -a -b some-arg\n
    getopt-example.sh -abc some-arg\n
    getopt-example.sh --along --blong --clong value-for-c -a -b -c some-arg\n
    getopt-example.sh some-arg --clong value-for-c\n
    getopt-example.sh
"

aflag=false
bflag=false
cargument=""

# options may be followed by one colon to indicate they have a required argument
if ! options=$(getopt -o abc:h\? -l along,blong,help,clong: -- "$@")
then
    # something went wrong, getopt will put out an error message for us
    exit 1
fi

set -- $options

while [ $# -gt 0 ]
do
    case $1 in
    -a|--along) aflag=true ;;
    -b|--blong) bflag=true ;;
    # for options with required arguments, an additional shift is required
    -c|--clong) cargument="$2" ; shift;;
    -h|--help|-\?) echo -e $HELP_TEXT; exit;;
    (--) shift; break;;
    (-*) echo "$0: error - unrecognized option $1" 1>&2; exit 1;;
    (*) break;;
    esac
    shift
done

# to remove the single quotes around arguments, pipe the output into:
# | sed -e "s/^'\\|'$//g"  (just leading/trailing) or | sed -e "s/'//g"  (all)

echo aflag=${aflag}
echo bflag=${bflag}
echo cargument=${cargument}

while [ $# -gt 0 ]
do
    echo arg=$1
    shift

    if [[ $aflag == true ]]; then
        echo a is true
    fi

done