but command line parsing is a part of your program that must be easy and quick to program, and very easy to extend

It's also a part of the user interface of your program, and like all user interfaces, it should match what the user's expectations are (DWIM, if you will). That's why human interface guidelines specify consistency from one application to another.

Getopt::Long implements many of the long standing conventions people expect to be able to use on the command line. Some of the ones you are missing in your home rolled implementation are:

• Your long option -logfile does not follow the double dash convention.
• Your long option names cannot be abbreviated to a unique substring.
• Your option -logfile that takes an argument cannot be specified as a single argument (which works by juxtaposition (bundling) for short options and --option=value for long options).

So I suggest use of Getopt::Long, it's part of the standard distribution after all. However, it's not perfect either. For example, bundling is off by default but people used to the UNIX command line will expect bundling to work.

That said, the original question was about multiple modules picking out options from the command line. Take a look at how some modules like Gtk2 deal with this. Gtk2 wants to handle some options but so might the application. So the Gtk2 initialization code fiddles with the program's @ARGV to find the options it is interested in, removed them, leaving the rest for the application to process (incidentally, it works the same in the C version). The application does not have to worry about the GTK+ specific options. Maybe the OP can use the same method?

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.