Actually, you don't even need to live with the double hyphen. Single hyphen is also parsed by Getopt::Long. Note that clustering does not work, however: -rex gets interpreted as one option, 'rex' (Update: (thanks chipmunk!) unless you turn them on). But otherwise you can use single-letter options as long as they are distinct. If you really want to do this sort of option-parsing, though, try Getopt::Mixed.