Originally posted by: SystemAdmin

We are currently using

set -- $(getopt ... $*)
...
while test "--" != "$1"
do
case "$1" in
...
esac
shift
done

as described by getopt(1)

This is good enough for most of our executables,
but it has two significant limitations.

1. It fails to properly handle quoted spaces in CLI options.
2. It does not read from a CLI named configuration file.

Does anyone have a sample (or pointer to sample) that
will properly handle spaces in /bin/sh CLI option arguments?

foo -a 'this has space'

I have tried using $@,
but so far without success.
I think an example would provide the missing details.

Does anyone have a sample (or pointer to sample) that
will read arguments from a file argument to -f option,
before processing the rest of the options?

foo -f configfile -a 'override'
foo -a 'override' -f configfile

I have tried parsing once with getopts,
scanning the arguments for a configuration file,
reading the configuration file, and
scanning the arguments as indicated by getopt(1)

set -- $(getopts ... $*)
for f in $*
do
case "$f" in
...
-f) CONF=...
...
esac
done
if test -r "$CONF"
then
read-conf-file
fi
while test "--" != "$1"
do
case "$1" in
...
esac
...
shift
done

The limitations of the above include
1. option argument spaces are still mishandled
2. reading the conf file is currently inelegant at best
and ad hoc at worst

Does anyone have a simple (or pointer to sample)
that parses a config file parallel to CLI options?

Ideally, I would like to
1. read option and possible argument from each conf file line
2. prepend the options and arguments to the argument list
3. rerun getopt
so that there would be no difference between whether an
option was supplied on the command line or in the conf file.

TIA,
#AIX-Forum