hpux man page for getopt

getopt(1)						      General Commands Manual							 getopt(1)

NAME
       getopt - parse command options

SYNOPSIS
       optstring args

DESCRIPTION
       is used to break up options in command lines for easy parsing by shell procedures and to check for legal options.  optstring is a string of
       recognized option letters (see getopt(3C)).  If a letter is followed by a colon, the option is expected to have an argument, which  may	or
       may not be separated from it by whitespace.

       The  positional	parameters  ...)  of the shell are reset so that each option is preceded by a and is in its own positional parameter; each
       option argument is also parsed into its own positional parameter.

       recognizes two hyphens to delimit the end of the options.  If absent, places at the end of the options.

       The most common use of is in the shell's command (see the example below) where converts the command line to  a  more  easily  parsed  form.
       writes the modified command line to the standard output.

EXTERNAL INFLUENCES
   Environment Variables
       determines the language in which messages are displayed.

       If is not specified in the environment or is set to the empty string, the value of is used as a default for each unspecified or empty vari-
       able.

       If is not specified or is set to the empty string, a default of "C" (see lang(5)) is used instead of If any  internationalization  variable
       contains an invalid setting, behaves as if all internationalization variables are set to "C".  See environ(5).

   International Code Set Support
       Single-byte and multibyte character code sets are supported.

DIAGNOSTICS
       prints an error message on the standard error when it encounters an option letter that is not included in optstring.

EXAMPLES
       The following code fragment processes the arguments for a command that can take the options or and the option which requires an argument:

       This code accepts any of the following as equivalent:

WARNINGS
       option arguments must not be null strings nor contain embedded blanks.

SEE ALSO
       getopts(1), sh(1), getopt(3C).

																	 getopt(1)