From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Miles Bader <miles.bader@necel.com>
Subject: Re: What's cooking in git.git (topics)
Date: Fri, 02 Nov 2007 15:06:54 +0900
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Cc: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>, git@vger.kernel.org
To: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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In-Reply-To: <alpine.LFD.0.999.0711011129460.3342@woody.linux-foundation.org> (Linus Torvalds's message of "Thu\, 1 Nov 2007 11\:33\:13 -0700 \(PDT\)")
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Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> writes:
> So while you can combine flags for *most* programs, you still won't 
> be able to say things like
>
> 	git clean -qdx
>
> just because that's still a shellscript, and doing any fancy argument 
> parsing in shell is just painful.

Indeed... but for my personal shell scripts I like to use a construct
like the following for parsing args:

   while :; do
     case "$1" in
        ... lots of cases to handle normal args ...

       -[!-]?*)
         # split concatenated single-letter options apart
         FIRST="$1"; shift
         set -- `echo $FIRST | $SED 's/-\(.\)\(.*\)/-\1 -\2/'` "$@"
         ;;

       -*)
         # unrecognized option
         unrec_opt "$1"; exit 1;;
       *)
         # non-option
         break;
     esac
   done

I'm sure there are problems with it, but it generally seems to work
pretty reasonably for short options.

-Miles
-- 
97% of everything is grunge