According to the standards, options must appear on a command line before operands. On most systems getopts enforces that requirement as you have found. There are ways to get around that, but since I believe the standards have specified this behavior correctly, I will not help you violate these requirements.

Similar questions have been asked in this forum many times before and there are many examples (including several written by me) that how you how to use getopts as it is intended to be used.

If you hit "Search" on the tool bar at the top of this page, select "Advanced Search", enter "getopts" as a keyword, enter "Don Cragun" in the Member Name field, and select "Search Now", you'll get about 25 threads that discuss this topic... Look at those first, and if you still have questions, post a more specific question showing the Synopsis section of a man page for the utility whose command-line options you want to parse, the code you have tried to accomplish that, and tell us about any problems you are experiencing.

Any time you are dealing with an issue like this, please tell us what operating system and shell you are using:

Code:

uname -a        # to get detail on your operating system
shell --version    # to get the version of the shell you are using
what /path/to/shell | grep Version # alternative way to get shell version

where shell is there name of the shell you use and /path/to/shell is the absolute pathname of the shell you are using. For example, using ksh on Mac OS X Yosemite version 10.10.2, the those commands produce the output shown in bold:

Code:

$ ksh --version
ksh --version
  version         sh (AT&T Research) 93u+ 2012-08-01
$ what /bin/ksh | grep Version
	$Id: Version AJM 93u+ 2012-08-01 $