Home/ Questions/Q 60883
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-10T18:13:54+00:00

How do you pass options to an executable? Is there an easier way than

  • 0

How do you pass options to an executable? Is there an easier way than making the options boolean arguments?

EDIT: The last two answers have suggested using arguments. I know I can code a workable solution like that, but I’d rather have them be options.

EDIT2: Per requests for clarification, I’ll use this simple example: It’s fairly easy to handle arguments because they automatically get parsed into an array.

./printfile file.txt 1000

If I want to know what the name of the file the user wants to print, I access it via argv[1].

Now about how this situation:

./printfile file.txt 1000 --nolinebreaks

The user wants to print the file with no line breaks. This is not required for the program to be able to run (as the filename and number of lines to print are), but the user has the option of using if if s/he would like. Now I could do this using:

./printfile file.txt 1000 true

The usage prompt would inform the user that the third argument is used to determine whether to print the file with line breaks or not. However, this seems rather clumsy.

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. You seem to think that there is some fundamental difference between ‘options’ that start with ‘--‘ and ‘arguments’ that don’t. The only difference is in how you parse them.

    It might be worth your time to look at GNU’s getopt()/getopt_long() option parser. It supports passing arguments with options such as --number-of-line-breaks 47.

    • 0