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Unit 2 Part 3

The document discusses using the getopts utility in Linux to write scripts that accept command line options. It provides an example of a script that uses getopts to check for the -h and -a options, and explains how getopts works by examining the first argument and setting the second argument to the option letter. It also demonstrates how to handle options that require arguments using a colon in the options list. Finally, it provides a worked example of a script that uses getopts to process command line options including the -s option.

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8 views2 pages

Unit 2 Part 3

The document discusses using the getopts utility in Linux to write scripts that accept command line options. It provides an example of a script that uses getopts to check for the -h and -a options, and explains how getopts works by examining the first argument and setting the second argument to the option letter. It also demonstrates how to handle options that require arguments using a colon in the options list. Finally, it provides a worked example of a script that uses getopts to process command line options including the -s option.

Uploaded by

komal
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Options in Linux :

Writing a script with arguments is straightforward - you just need to examine $1, $2, etc. - but what about
options?

An option is an argument that commences with a hyphen.


Suppose you wanted to write a command mycommand which, if given option -h, would print a 'help'
message rather than executing:

$ mycommand -h
Usage: mycommand [-h]

You could check whether $1 is equal to '-h', but if you had several possible options, not just one, the number
of permutations would make this a very messy programming exercise. If mycommand took option -a in
addition to -h, you would have to check for:

In addition to any invalid options it might be presented with. The utility getopts is provided to assist in
writing shells that have options. Consider the instance above - we could have as the contents
of mycommand:

The action getopts performs is to look at getopts' first argument, which should be a list of letters -
representing the valid options allowed by the script - and possibly colons (see below). It then looks at the
next argument to the script in which it occurs. If the argument to a script is an option (i.e. preceded by a
minus sign), getopts checks to see whether the option is in the list of valid options. If not, an error message
is displayed. The second argument to getopts is a variable name, which is set to the option that getopts has
discovered. Options must precede all other arguments that are not options. Only one option at a time will be
checked, so you need to enclose getopts in a while loop. Let's see what happens when mycommand is called:

In the case of mycommand hello -h, the argument -h is not an option, since it has been preceded by an
argument which is not an option.
Some commands take options that require arguments - such as lp, whose option -d must be followed by the
name of the destination printer. This is handled in getopts by using colons.

If an option requires an argument, then a colon should follow the option name in the list of allowed options
to getopts. When that option is encountered, the value of its argument will be stored in the system
variable OPTARG. For instance, suppose a script called mymessage takes one option -m, followed by a
string, and displays that string. With no arguments, mymessage displays Hello. The string would be an
argument to the -m option. This script might be coded thus:

The number of the next argument to be processed by getopts is stored in OPTIND, so that by using shift you
can strip off the options from the command and leave the rest of the arguments for processing later.

Worked example
Write a script mymail to call mailx to send messages. The script should take an optional argument -s (to
specify the subject) and one or more other arguments to specify the recipients (just like mailx). No other
options apart from -s should be allowed. If mymail is called without option -s it should prompt the user for a
subject.

Solution: Use getopts to process the command line the script is invoked from:

If you intend to write scripts which require options, then using getopts is the preferred method.

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