I am looking for a reusable code snippet that does command line argument validation for bash.
Ideally something akin to the functionality offered by Apache Commons CLI:
Commons CLI supports different types of options:
- POSIX like options (ie. tar -zxvf foo.tar.gz)
- GNU like long options (ie. du --human-readable --max-depth=1)
- Short options with value attached (ie. gcc -O2 foo.c)
- long options with single hyphen (ie. ant -projecthelp)
- ...
and it generates a "usage" message for the program automatically, like this:
usage: ls
-A,--almost-all do not list implied . and ..
-a,--all do not hide entries starting with .
-B,--ignore-backups do not list implied entried ending with ~
-b,--escape print octal escapes for nongraphic characters
--block-size <SIZE> use SIZE-byte blocks
-c with -lt: sort by, and show, ctime (time of last
modification of file status information) with
-l:show ctime and sort by name otherwise: sort
by ctime
-C list entries by columns
I would include this code snippet at the beginning of my Bash scripts and reuse it across scripts.
There must be something like this. I don't believe we are all writing code to this effect or similar:
#!/bin/bash
NUMBER_OF_REQUIRED_COMMAND_LINE_ARGUMENTS=3
number_of_supplied_command_line_arguments=$#
function show_command_usage() {
echo usage:
(...)
}
if (( number_of_supplied_command_line_arguments < NUMBER_OF_REQUIRED_COMMAND_LINE_ARGUMENTS )); then
show_command_usage
exit
fi
...