I would still go with Getopt::Long. With the 'require_order' configuration mode it fails on the first item that it encounters that isnt a legal option. Then you can pull off the "nonoption" and do something with it. When done, call Getoptions again. Repeat until @ARGV is empty.

use Getopt::Long;
use Data::Dumper;
use strict;

my %opts=(a=>0,b=>0,c=>0);

sub process_file {
    my ($opts,$file)=@_;
      print "Processing $file ";
      print join ", ", map { "$_ => $opts{$_}" } keys %opts;
      print "\n";
}

Getopt::Long::Configure('require_order');

while (@ARGV) {
  #print Data::Dumper->Dump([\%opts,\@ARGV],[qw(*opts ARGV)]);

  GetOptions(\%opts,qw(a! b! c!));
  if (@ARGV) {
      my $file=shift;
      process_file(\%opts,$file);
  }
}
__END__
>perl gopt2.pl file0 -a file1 --noa --b file2 file3 --c file4 --nob fi
+le5
Processing file0 a => 0, b => 0, c => 0
Processing file1 a => 1, b => 0, c => 0
Processing file2 a => 0, b => 1, c => 0
Processing file3 a => 0, b => 1, c => 0
Processing file4 a => 0, b => 1, c => 1
Processing file5 a => 0, b => 0, c => 1
[download]

A bit more clever code could avoid having file2 and file3 treated as seperate arguments but as a list. Anyway, hth...

--- demerphq
my friends call me, usually because I'm late....