Chapter 11 of Mastering Perl is all about configuring Perl programs, including command line parsing and options.

You haven't provided any code, so we can't see what's actually happen (and thus help you). I'm not sure which module allows long switches with single hyphens and a space between the value either. Typically, however, the command line parsers parse what they can and leave the rest in @ARGV. Check some of the examples in Mastering Perl to see if one of them is what you need.

And, post a small test program the demonstrates your problem. Include what you expected it to do and what it actually does. :)

Good luck, :)