Getopt::Long getting a string with spaces into a variable

Question

I\'m making a perl script which uses Getopt::Long to parse command line arguments. However, I have an argument which can accept a string (with spaces). How can I get the who

Answer 1

This is really a reply to MaxMackie's question on Ernest's answer, but it's too long, so here goes:

Your script never sees the quotes, only the shell that is passing the arguments. When you call a script (or program), what is happening on a lower level is that the command is called with several arguments in an array. The shell normally splits arguments up based on whitespace. What your program sees right now is:

[0]./script.pl
[1]--string=blah
[2]blah
[3]blah
[4]blah
[5]yup
[6]--another-opt

Putting quotes around the string or escaping it results in in this:

[0]./script.pl
[1]--string=blah blah blah blah yup
[2]--another-opt

Shells (bash in particular, others I'm sure) allows interspersing quotes without spaces as much as you like. ls -"l""h" is the same as ls -lh, hence you an do "--string=blah blah" or --string="blah blah". The parsing of the individual arguments with getopt that lets you put them out of order and use --long-name or -l happens after everything is turned into an array item and passed to the program. The shell has nothing to do with that.