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

Here you can find a few different approaches for complex option parsing in bash: http://mywiki.wooledge.org/ComplexOptionParsing

I did create the following one, and I think it's a good one, because it's minimal code and both long and short options work. A long option can also have multiple arguments with this approach.

#!/bin/bash
# Uses bash extensions.  Not portable as written.

declare -A longoptspec
longoptspec=( [loglevel]=1 ) #use associative array to declare how many arguments a long option expects, in this case we declare that loglevel expects/has one argument, long options that aren't listed i n this way will have zero arguments by default
optspec=":h-:"
while getopts "$optspec" opt; do
while true; do
    case "${opt}" in
        -) #OPTARG is name-of-long-option or name-of-long-option=value
            if [[ "${OPTARG}" =~ .*=.* ]] #with this --key=value format only one argument is possible
            then
                opt=${OPTARG/=*/}
                OPTARG=${OPTARG#*=}
                ((OPTIND--))    
            else #with this --key value1 value2 format multiple arguments are possible
                opt="$OPTARG"
                OPTARG=(${@:OPTIND:$((longoptspec[$opt]))})
            fi
            ((OPTIND+=longoptspec[$opt]))
            continue #now that opt/OPTARG are set we can process them as if getopts would've given us long options
            ;;
        loglevel)
          loglevel=$OPTARG
            ;;
        h|help)
            echo "usage: $0 [--loglevel[=]]" >&2
            exit 2
            ;;
    esac
break; done
done

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