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10.2 The (ice-9 getopt-long) Module

A script is free to parse and handle its command line arguments in any way that it chooses. Where the set of possible options and arguments is complex, however, it can get tricky to extract all the options, check the validity of given arguments, and so on. This task can be greatly simplified by taking advantage of the module (ice-9 getopt-long), which is distributed with Guile.

The (ice-9 getopt-long) module exports two procedures: getopt-long and option-ref.

• getopt-long takes a list of strings -- the command line arguments -- and an option specification. It parses the command line arguments according to the option specification and returns a data structure that encapsulates the results of the parsing.
• option-ref then takes the parsed data structure and a specific option's name, and returns information about that option in particular.

To make these procedures available to your Guile script, include the expression (use-modules (ice-9 getopt-long)) somewhere near the top, before the first usage of getopt-long or option-ref.

• getopt-long Example: A short getopt-long example.
• Option Specification: How to write an option specification.
• Command Line Format: The expected command line format.
• getopt-long Reference: Full documentation for getopt-long.
• option-ref Reference: Full documentation for option-ref.