Now the real fun begins! In this second part of this chapter, we'll explain the getopts shell builtin. The getopts command is used in the beginning of your script to get the options you supplied in the form of flags. It has a very specific syntax that will seem confusing at first, but, once we've looked at it fully, it should not be too complicated for you to understand.
Before we dive in, though, we'll need to discuss two things:
- The difference between getopts and getopt
- Short versus long options
As stated, getopts is a shell builtin. It is available in both the regular Bourne shell (sh) and in Bash. It originated around 1986, as a replacement for getopt, which was created sometime before 1980.
In contrast to getopts, getopt is not built into the shell: it is a standalone program that has been ported to many different Unix and Unix-like...
