commandlines for Rust

About

commandlines is a command line argument parsing library for Rust command line interface application development. The goal is to support most POSIX/GNU program argument syntax conventions.

The project is in development and the library API is not stable. Please see the developer documentation at https://docs.rs/commandlines.

Current POSIX/GNU Argument Syntax Convention Support

Available

• Arguments are options if they begin with a hyphen delimiter (-)
• Option names are single alphanumeric characters
• Options typically precede other non-option arguments
• The argument -- terminates all options; any following arguments are treated as non-option arguments, even if they begin with a hyphen
• Options may be supplied in any order, or appear multiple times. The interpretation is left up to the particular application program
• Long options consist of -- followed by a name made of alphanumeric characters and dashes. Option names are typically one to three words long, with hyphens to separate words
• To specify an argument for a long option, write ‘--name=value’. This syntax enables a long option to accept an argument that is itself optional
• Certain options require an argument. For example, the ‘-o’ command of the ld command requires an argument—an output file name
• A token consisting of a single hyphen character is interpreted as an ordinary non-option argument. By convention, it is used to specify input from or output to the standard input and output streams.
• Multiple options may follow a hyphen delimiter in a single token if the options do not take arguments. Thus, -abc is equivalent to -a -b -c

Not Available Yet

• An option and its argument may or may not appear as separate tokens. (In other words, the whitespace separating them is optional.) Thus, ‘-o foo’ and ‘-ofoo’ are equivalent.