From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0) Description of problem: The getopt man page claims that getopt returns ':' if an option was missing a parameter, but this behavior does not occur. getopt simply returns the next option as the parameter if there is no parameter. How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. make a C++ program using getopt (I did not test with a C program) that prints out the options as processed by getopt. 2. Specify that an option will have a parameter, such as "a:c" or some such. 3. run with syntax such as "program -a -c" Actual Results: -c will be the parameter for -a. Expected Results: getopt should return ':' instead. Additional info:
No, getopt is right. If optstring is say "a:b" and the arguments are -a -b, then -b is argument of -a, if you read the man page carefully (or better yet info libc), you'll see that if option has required argument, then the required argument is either taken from the rest of current argument, or next argument. The missing argument condition happens only if option requiring argument is the last argument. Furthermore, getopt will even in that situation return '?', unless the first character in optstring is ':', in which case. So, if you really want to see getopt return ':', you should use optstring ":a:b" and pass arguments say -b -a BTW: This required argument handling is standard, not some GNU specific feature. E.g. Solaris mentions in getopt(3C) man page that getopt with optstring, citing: > Given an option string a:b and the input -a -b, getopt() assumes that -b is > the mandatory argument to the -a option and not that -a is missing a > mandatory argument.