[Anarion]

Sooner or later, you will feel the need to write scripts that receive parameters; they can be much complicated or much simple. Either way, you need to think of how they must be implemented... Yes you can do it with some if/else or case or other loops, but... this can get very bad and hard to control, Specially if the parameters should take arguments!

Don't worry much there is a built-in feature in Bash, named getopts. It enables you to manipulate the parameters/arguments given to your program much easily

Preface

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if/case Conditional Statements
while Loops
Using test To Check true/false stuff
Using Variables
Writing Functions

Begin!

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First of all, let's review what our sample script has to do: it accepts two parameters, each of them prints a different sentence. If there are any other unknown parameters other than what we wanted or no parameters given, print the usage message.

First, we write a basic function which prints the help message when called, and then check the number of parameters given and see if it is zero:

#!/bin/bash

function help {
    echo "Usage: test -p"
}

if test $# -eq 0; then
    help
    exit 0
fi

exit 0

OK, test and run! if you don't give any parameters, it prints the help message. But... what about checking the parameter itself? Thats where getopts comes into play! First of all, look at the following script, which adds the getopts to the above script:

#!/bin/bash

function help {
    echo "Usage: test -p"
}

if test $# -eq 0; then
    help
    exit 0
fi

while getopts "p" option; do
    case $option in
        p) echo "this is a test";;
        *) help;;
    esac
done

exit 0

How It Works?

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Each time the while loop is executed, getopts puts the next parameter into the variable option. The parameters desired, must be defined as a string, containing them one by one. For example, if you want to accept the parameters a, b, and c, the loop should be:

while getopts "abc" var; do
    case $var in
        a) echo "parameter a given";;
        b ) echo "parameter b given";;
        c) echo "parameter c given";;
        *) echo "Usage: script -abc";;
    esac
done

See how easy it is? now, what about the arguments for each parameter?

Accepting Arguments

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getopts gives you a way to accept arguments for a parameter too! Just put a : after the parameter's name. Like this:

while getopts "a:bc" var; do
    case $var in
        a) echo "parameter a given, it's argument is $OPTARG";;
        b ) echo "parameter b given";;
        c) echo "parameter c given";;
        *) echo "Usage: script -a message -bc";;
    esac
done

As understood from above script, the corresponding argument for a parameter is inside the variable OPTARG. So, you can easily manage it

Wrong Parameters

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If a user gives your script unexpected parameters, for example -f in above script, getopts automatically prints a message stating wrong parameter given, some times it is useful. But if you don't want to receive such message and handle things yourself with a nicer way, you can tell getopts to suppress these kind of messages, by putting a colon at first of parameter definition. Like this:

while getopts ":a:bc" var; do
    case $var in
        a) echo "parameter a given, it's argument is $OPTARG";;
        b ) echo "parameter b given";;
        c) echo "parameter c given";;
        *) echo "Usage: script -a message -bc";;
    esac
done

This, was a way to parse basic parameters and arguments. If you like to work with parameters like -param, getopts is not the way to do it. So you have to implement it yourself

Hope this tutorial helped you get started and ready to accept parameters