The recent versions of Getopt::Long support a really wide variety of option syntax, including all of the examples you gave above (except that you would need to use '-v' instead of 'v': it does need a character to distinguish options from option values). You can also use both long and short options, include or omit equal signs, follow each option with a single value or many, and even do some lightweight type checking. Order doesn't matter - you can have a multi-valued option before or after other options. Command lines such as:

• myscript.pl --name joe -v=0 --list a b c
• myscript.pl --name joe --val=0 --list a --list b --list c
• myscript.pl --name joe --list a --list b --list c -v=0
• myscript.pl --name joe --list a b c -v=0

can be parsed with the following code:

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

#-------------------------------------------------------
sub parseArgs {
  my ($aRules, $aArgs) = @_;

  # version used with 5.8.8 expects arguments in @ARGV
  # the version in the 5.10 core has a function that can
  # read arguments from any array, not just @ARGV.

  local @ARGV = @$aArgs;
  Getopt::Long::GetOptions(my $hOpts={}, @$aRules);
  return $hOpts;
}

#-------------------------------------------------------

my $aRules
  =  [ 'name=s'        #allow any string as value
       , 'val|v=i'     #allow --val or -v, require number
       , 'list=s@{,}'  #allow arbitrary lists of values
     ];

my $hParsed = parseArgs($aRules, \@ARGV);
print Dumper($hParsed);
[download]

For all of these various combinations of command line arguments it would produce the same data structure:

$VAR1 = {
          'name' => 'joe',
          'val' => 0,
          'list' => [
                      'a',
                      'b',
                      'c'
                    ]
        };
[download]

Best, beth

Update: added example with multivalued option followed by other options, as per request of jakobi.

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