Question

I’m working on a little script in Perl and I have problems with parameters from the command line. I’m using GetOps to parse them as shown in the code below:

%params = (
  "help" => "",
  "no_inline" => "",
  "no_dupl" => ""
);

&paramError if (!GetOptions(
  "help" => \$params{"help"},
  "no-inline" => \$params{"no_inline"},
  "no-duplicates" => \$params{"no_dupl"},
));

I then run the script like this:

> script.pl --no-inline # ok, valid parameter
> script.pl --no-inline blahblah # blahblah is not valid
> script.pl --no-i # not valid

Problem is that in the second and third example GetOps says the parameters are valid. What should I do in order do make these parameters invalid?

Answer 1

Your third example is valid. GetOptions accepts abbreviated names as long as they are not ambiguous.
If you had for example an option called no-indent, your third example would have been rejected because it is ambiguous, but --no-inl would still be accepted.

To disable this, use:

use Getopt::Long qw(:config no_auto_abbrev);

See Configuring Getopt::Long for other options.

Your second example is perfectly normal. blahblah will be left in @ARGV after the GetOptions call. If your script only accepts the options you specified, and cannot take other arguments (like filenames or whatever), just check that @ARGV is empty after the call.