Grammar Details

If you're not familiar with *nix command line environment, you should know that this library was inspired by C function getopt.

You may want read also this Wikipedia article.

These conventions allow two kind of arguments, options and values:

• values can be or not be bound to options.
• options can be defined with short name, long name or both.

Short Name

A short name is defined with a single character (in .NET context a System.Char) and is invoked using single dash or hyphen:

$ coolapp -f my.file

But this is not the only valid syntax. When a short name is mapped to a System.Boolean, you have just invoke or omit it.

$ coolapp -v

With the previous example I say to coolapp to activate the option named v. To deactivate it, I simply omit its invocation from the command line:

$ coolapp

Short options can be group, so that:

;; this is valid (omitting space between short options)
$ coolapp -vf my.file

;; and also this (omitting space between short option an its value)
$ coolapp -vfmy.file

And what is not allowed?

$ coolapp -fv my.file

or any similar combination. Values are supplied by proximity and since v doesn't accept values, because is a boolean, in this case:

• you're telling coolapp that the file is called v as the option
• and my.file is left unbound