Thanks for your help. I've done somthing like this in the past, and I didn't really wont to change the code at this stage but needs must.

The good people at Indigostar also came up with this

use Getopt::Long;
my ($verbose, $quiet, $test, $debug, $help) = (0,0,0,0,0);
GetOptions ('verbose' => \$verbose, 'quiet' => \$quiet, 'test' =>
\$test, 'help' => \$help, 'debug' => \$debug);
[download]

Thanks again