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Re: Wrong explanation of getopts

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  Re: Wrong explanation of getopts Roland Illig <roland.illig@gmx.de> - 2019-09-15 23:17 +0200

#15370 — Re: Wrong explanation of getopts

Am 15.09.2019 um 22:38 schrieb Eduardo Bustamante:
> On Sun, Sep 15, 2019 at 12:58 PM Roland Illig <roland.illig@gmx.de> wrote:
>>
>> The help text of getopts says:
>>
>>>   Getopts normally parses the positional parameters ($0 - $9), but if
>>>   more arguments are given, they are parsed instead.
> (...)
>> The "instead" in "they are parsed instead" is totally wrong. $1 to $9
>> are always parsed, no matter if there are more than 10 positional
>> parameters or not.
>
> It's not wrong.

Ok, maybe not strictly wrong, but still misleading. In my first try to
read the documentation, and I really did read with good intentions, I
thought the "more" would refer to the "more than $9", and with that
interpretation in mind, the "instead" is clearly wrong.

>> $ getopts
>> getopts: usage: getopts optstring name [arg]
>
> It's referring to the fact that you can explicitly pass a set of
> parameters to `getopts' (i.e. the `[arg]' part), instead of it using
> the script's positional parameters (i.e. $@).

$@ also doesn't include $0. What does $0 have to do with getopts?

In my opinion, the help should read like this:

getopts: getopts optstring name [args]
    Parse option arguments.

    ...

    If ARGS are given, they are parsed. Otherwise the usual positional
    parameters $@ are parsed instead.

The changes are that "arg" is renamed to "args", and it is referred to
unambiguously by saying ARGS in the main text. I also left out the word
"more" since it was the main source of my confusion.

In other parts of the help, repeated arguments are written as [ARG ...]
instead of [ARGS]. For consistency, the same pattern could be used here
as well. In that case, the text should be "If ARGs are given, ...".

Roland

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