Hiya, Perl newbie here! I've been learning it alongside Ruby with my background consisting of mostly shell, C, and Python (the latter of which takes a wholly different approach to argument parsing).

As I write more Perl scripts with options, I prefer my option parser to be very strictly configured. My problem is that no matter how I configure Getopt::Long, it always accepts single character options with two preceding dashes. I achieved a compromise when rewriting one of my uglier sh+awk scripts, and here's a stripped down example:

use Getopt::Long qw(
    :config
    posix_default
    gnu_compat
    bundling
    no_auto_abbrev
    no_ignore_case
);

my $column = 1;

GetOptions(
    'column|c=i' => \$column,
) or die;
die if $column < 1;

[download]

I want this program to accept exactly two strings as options, --column and -c, but it also accepts --c. I want the prefix for short options to be - and only -, similar to how -- is treated for long options when bundling is enabled. I had hoped qw( :config prefix_pattern - long_prefix_pattern -- ) would get me what I want, but it seems like the latter isn't processed if the former doesn't match. Anyone know of a clean way to achieve this?

Also, feel free to suggest improvements or mention best practices! If anyone wants, I can post the full script as well; it's intended to format numbers from stdin/files into human-readable sizes like 681.2K, 12.1M, 3.5G. I should probably figure out my preferred license as well...

In reply to Enforce single hyphen for single character options in Getopt::Long by mrnoname1000

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