25.1.2 Parsing Program Arguments

If the syntax for the command line arguments to your program is simple enough, you can simply pick the arguments off from argv by hand. But unless your program takes a fixed number of arguments, or all of the arguments are interpreted in the same way (as file names, for example), you are usually better off using getopt (see Getopt) or argp_parse (see Argp) to do the parsing.

getopt is more standard (the short-option only version of it is a part of the POSIX standard), but using argp_parse is often easier, both for very simple and very complex option structures, because it does more of the dirty work for you.

• Getopt: Parsing program options using getopt.
• Argp: Parsing program options using argp_parse.
• Suboptions: Some programs need more detailed options.
• Suboptions Example: This shows how it could be done for mount.