Getopt::Tabular version 0.1 11 November, 1996 Copyright (c) 1995-96 Greg Ward. All rights reserved. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. Getopt::Tabular is a Perl 5 module for table-driven argument parsing, vaguely inspired by John Ousterhout's Tk_ParseArgv. See Tabular.pod for details. It is available from ftp://ftp.bic.mni.mcgill.ca/users/greg and should be available through CPAN at http://www.perl.com/CPAN/modules/by-author/GWARD Some nice features of Getopt::Tabular are: * Command-line arguments are carefully type-checked, both by pattern and number---e.g. if an option requires two integers, the module makes sure that exactly two integers follow it! * The valid command-line arguments are specified in a data structure separate from the call to the module's main routine (GetOptions); this makes it easier to have very long lists of options, and to parse options from multiple sources (e.g. the command line, an environment variable, and a configuration file). * Getopt::Tabular can intelligently generate help text based on your option descriptions. * The type system is extensible, and if you can define your desired argument type using a single Perl regular expression then it's particularly easy to extend. * To make your program look smarter, options can be abbreviated and come in any order. To install Getopt::Tabular: perl ./Makefile.PL make install That's it! There's no test code yet, but there is a demo program that shows off several of the module's features. And the documentation is quite extensive; only a few minor features aren't covered. Email problems, questions, bug reports, etc. to greg@bic.mni.mcgill.ca.