Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,
I've just been looking through all the getopts related posts and there appear to be many different approaches to reading a command and its options in and checking for errors.
However, the only one I can get to work is as follows:

while getopts :fvriR opt
do
case $opt in
f) echo "f";;
v) echo "v";;
R|r) echo "Rr";;
i) echo "i";;
\?) echo "invalid option $OPTARG"
esac
done

Would I be correct in saying that the above will catch all false options entered? I honestly do not understand the significance of the ":" character in getopts - if anyone knows a page explaining its usage (other than the "man" page), please let me know.
Otherwise, I have seen the following kinds of syntax:

while getopts :f:v:r:i:R opt
while getopts f:v:r:i:R: opt

These don't work on my script - i.e. they don't catch erroneous options entered, so what are they used for, does anyone know?

And is my code above a "catch-all" for erroneous options, or does it miss out on any that I can't think of?

Learning the Korn Shell - 6. Command-line Options ans Typed Variables - 6.1 Command-line Options

Jean-Pierre.

Hi.
Returns "page deleted" for me ... cheers, drl

Hi.

Your answer for colon is in the man page:
See also a long example at http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/internal.html#EX33 ... cheers, drl

Thanks, Ill check that one out.

Another getopts problem, similar to the above. How to account for the situation where someone types the following:

command -ri file1 -v file2

My code above cannot handle that.

So here is what I have been experimenting with:

#################################################

while [ $# -gt 1 ]
do
while getopts :fvriR opt
do
case $opt in
f) fopt=1; iopt=0;;
v) vopt=1;;
[Rr]) ropt=1;;
i) iopt=1; fopt=0;;
\?) invalid_option $OPTARG;;
esac
done

# Move past the option arguments to the file arguments
shift `expr $OPTIND - 1`

filelist="$filelist $1"

done

do_whatever $filelist

#################################################

The above works for "command -ri file1 -v file2"
However, it breaks down when I try something like follows:
"command -ri file1 file2 -v file3"
I suppose the shift command is doing the damage somehow, but I can't figure out how to fix it.
Does anyone have any suggestions?

dkieran,
pls use vB Codes when posting to the forums - it'll improve the chances of your questions being answered.