| The Long And Short Of It |

The Console_Getopt class is a PEAR package that provides an API for PHP developers to capture options passed to a PHP program on the command line, and act on them within the business logic of the program. It's currently maintained by Andrei Zmievski and Stig Bakken, – both of whom are PHP core developers - and is freely available from http://pear.php.net/package/Console_Getopt, or as part of the standard PHP distribution. It goes without saying that you will also need to have PEAR itself (PEAR.php) installed in order to use this package.

Command-line options usually come in two sizes: short and long. In the short format, these options are usually preceded by a dash, as in the following example:


shell> php -h


Under the POSIX standard, it's also possible to use longer, human-readable command-line options, preceded with a double dash, as in the following example:


shell> php --help


You can also pass values to a program from the command-line interface, like this:


shell> lynx --term=VT100


The Console_Getopt class works with both short and long options, and also supports option values. The class conforms to PEAR rules on error handling and coding syntax and is, in fact, a fairly important component of PEAR: the PEAR package manager itself uses Console_Getopt for many tasks.

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