AutoOpts

I recently had the opportunity to use AutoOpts 25:1, which is included with AutoGen 5.7.1, and was thoroughly impressed. This package is a command line option parser that utilizes AutoGen templates and a runtime library to simplify the process of parsing and documenting command line options. With AutoOpts, you can specify up to 100 option types and numerous attributes for each option, making it an incredibly powerful tool for handling command line input.

One of the great things about AutoOpts is that once you've defined your program's option definitions, AutoGen will expand the templates into two C source files. Additionally, this package can create a man page document and a tex-info "invoking" document section, which can be incredibly useful. The header and code files contain all the information that AutoOpts needs to parse and handle the command line, environment variables, and initialization file (rc file) options.

When your program runs, the AutoOpts library will interpret the compiled data created by AutoGen. It's also worth noting that if you prefer to use "getopt_long(3GNU) or getopt(3C)" to parse the options instead of AutoOpts' libopts library, you can easily do so. The package includes a template (getopt.tpl) that takes restricted AutoOpts option definitions and produces the parsing loop that calls either "getopt(3C)" or "getopt_long(3GNU)" (depending on whether long options are enabled in your description). However, it's important to recognize that this method is significantly less robust than using the full set of AutoOpts features.

Overall, I found AutoOpts to be quite impressive. It's available either under the terms of the Library GNU Public License or the terms of the advertising-clause-free BSD license, which makes it incredibly flexible. If you're looking for a powerful and efficient command line option parser, I would definitely recommend giving AutoOpts a try.