bash-argparse: simple command line parsing for bash scripts

bash-argparse is a tool to parse your bash scripts command-line arguments.

Features

• Specify command-line arguments from a signature
• Short and long options
• Positional and optional arguments
• Type checking
• Default values
• Only requires a standard python (>= 3.7) installation

bash-argparse vs getopt?

• Ease-of-use: If you already know any typed programming language, bash-argparse may feel more intuitive, since the script signature resembles a normal function definition.
• Type Safety: Skip writing input validation by relying on bash-argparse checking the user's input against the type specification.
• Automatic: Rely on bash-argparse deducing the program's name and short-options.

Install

Requirements

• Python 3.7 or above

Installation steps

Install it from pip:

pip install bash-argparse

Or check the artifacts from the GitHub actions pipelines to download a nightly build.

Basic Usage

Here is a basic example:

#!/bin/bash
set -eou pipefail

# accepts 4 options passed to the script (through `$@`)
#   * a boolean flag --foo/-f, or --no-foo
#   * an integer option --bar <I>/-b<I>
#   * and a string option --fuz <S>/-F <S>
#   * --help or -h to print the automatic help message
eval $( python3 -m bash-argparse \
        --signature "bool foo; int bar; string Fuz" \
        --description "This program does many things." \
        -- "$@" )

# the variables are set by `eval`
echo $FOO $BAR $FUZ

• bash program.sh prints false 0
• bash program.sh --bar 4 prints false 4
• bash program.sh -f --bar 4 prints true 4
• bash program.sh -f --fuz 'hello' prints true 0 hello

Documentation

See the documentation in the doc/ directory

License

This project is distributed under the MIT License. For more information see the LICENSE file.