Question

I’m kind of new in bash and I have a problem for which I’m unable to find solution anywhere on the internet.

Before I do something like trying to program it by myself, I would like to see what is the standard way of dealing with situations like this.

Basicaly I would like to capture getopts to array…

I’m not sure if I’m clear enough so let’s try to take a look at this PHP example:

http://www.test.com/index.php?a=1&b=2

<?php
function getParams() {
return $_GET[];
}
?>

This is what I want for like:
myscript -a 1 -b 2

So far, each and every mention of getopts that i have found was implicating that I need to know exactly what I’m trying to get like:

while getopts a:b: option
do
  case "${option}"
    in
      a) a=${OPTARG};;
      b) b=${OPTARG};;
  esac
done

Is there a way in which I could have associative array of all arguments passed to the script no matter what those options are so I can always do something like this:

OPTS = get_params

echo $OPTS[@]

And then I could do some validation of my own etc…

Once again sorry if I’m missing something obvious, I’m really new to bash and I would really appreciate any help or guidance where to start.

Thank you very much in advance.

Answer 1

You can go along these lines:

#!/bin/bash

declare -A my_opts

while (($#)); do
   case $1 in
      -- )
         shift
         break
         ;;
      -* )
         my_opts[${1#-}]=$2
         shift 2
         ;;
      * )
         break
         ;;
   esac
done

for k in "${!my_opts[@]}"; do
   echo "$k => ${my_opts[$k]}"
done

# At this point, you still have the remaining arguments in $@

echo "Arguments left: ${@:-(none)}"

# End of script #

Call this script test_args and chmod +x test_args. Then (illustrating the side effects of this oversimplified method):

$ ./test_args -a 1 -b 2
a => 1
b => 2
Arguments left: (none)

$ ./test_args -a 1 -- -b 2
a => 1
Arguments left: -b 2
$ ./test_args -a 1 foo -b 2
a => 1
Arguments left: foo -b 2

$ ./test_args --a 1 -b 2
-a => 1
b => 2
Arguments left: (none)

$ # And a bad one (with this simplified version):
$ ./test_args -a -- foo
-a => --
Arguments left: foo