7.5.3.2 shell-process: emit Bourne shell results

This will produce a main() procedure that parses the command line options and emits to stdout Bourne shell commands that puts the option state into environment variables. This can be used within a shell script as follows:

unset OPTION_CT
eval "`opt_parser \"$@\"`"
test -z "${OPTION_CT}" && exit 1
test ${OPTION_CT} -gt 0 && shift ${OPTION_CT}

If the option parsing code detects an error or a request for usage, it will not emit an assignment to OPTION_CT and the script should just exit. If the options are set consistently, then something along the lines of the following will be written to stdout and evaled:

    OPTION_CT=4
    export OPTION_CT
    MYPROG_SECOND='first'
    export MYPROG_SECOND
    MYPROG_ANOTHER=1 # 0x1
    export MYPROG_ANOTHER

If the arguments are to be reordered, however, then the resulting set of operands will be emitted and OPTION_CT gets set to zero. For example, the following would be appended to the above:

    set -- 'operand1' 'operand2' 'operand3'
    OPTION_CT=0

OPTION_CT is set to zero since it is not necessary to shift off any options.

This document was generated by Bruce Korb on September, 30 2006 using texi2html 1.76.