Re: New flag option request

[Eric Blake]

On 10/20/2011 08:48 AM, Bruce Korb wrote:
> You may have this in the queue already, but just in case:
>
> POSIX now specifies that if a standard utility has extended options,
> then you accomplish it with ``-W option-name[=opt-arg]''.

Not quite.  POSIX specifies only that -W is reserved for 
implementation-defined extensions.  glibc's getopt_long _happens_ to 
have the implementation-defined extension that '-W foo' is equivalent to 
'--foo', so it would make sense that bash support the same extension as 
glibc for consistency among GNU programs, but that is _not_ a POSIX 
requirement.

> I wouldn't care, but I wanted to add ``--noprofile --norc''
> to the command line and, for debugging purposes, I aliased "bash"
> to "bash -x". Oops. Two issues:
>
> 1. I'd be nice to be able to interleave short and long options, and
> 2. "bash -x -W noprofile -W norc" should also work.

Bash currently doesn't use getopt_long for option parsing, but rolls its 
own parser.  A patch to make the bash parser support mixed long and 
short options would also be welcome in my mind.

--
Eric Blake   eblake@redhat.com    +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org