User input from a command line by giving options a,b,c

mgrangeiro has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: User input from a command line by giving options a,b,c by roboticus (Chancellor) on Apr 06, 2010 at 17:16 UTC
mgrangeiro: Is it possible to do that? Yes. I started out by ... but that's not exactly what my boss wants. So perhaps you might describe what your boss wants, rather than having us try to guess? Perhaps you might try Getopts::Long? ...roboticus	[reply]
Re^2: User input from a command line by giving options a,b,c by mgrangeiro (Novice) on Apr 06, 2010 at 19:16 UTC
I thought I was clear enough that I wanted to write a script with menu options a,b,c, etc. and get the user input from a command line, but obviously I was not. I'll tell you what I did. I displayed a menu with 5 options in vim and prompted for user input. My boss said I should consider using command line so we could run the script from anywhere. Let me know if there is any other info I might be missing. Thanks for your patience. I'm a newbie with perl.	[reply]
Re: User input from a command line by giving options a,b,c by DStaal (Chaplain) on Apr 06, 2010 at 17:52 UTC
I think you don't really mean 'in a command line', but more 'through a text menu', if I understand you correctly. (At least, not through the normal understanding of 'command line', whether it is accurate or not.) Take a look at Term::UI, Term::Menu, and IO::Prompt. I think those do what you are looking for.	[reply]
Re^2: User input from a command line by giving options a,b,c by mgrangeiro (Novice) on Apr 06, 2010 at 18:11 UTC
As a text menu through a command line. Is it possible? Thanks	[reply]
Re^3: User input from a command line by giving options a,b,c by ww (Archbishop) on Apr 06, 2010 at 18:20 UTC
Why do you think DStaal offered the observation and provided those links? Do we do it for you? That's a different question.	[reply]
Re^3: User input from a command line by giving options a,b,c by DStaal (Chaplain) on Apr 06, 2010 at 19:48 UTC
You mean have the script display the menu before it is run? Not really.	[reply]
Re: User input from a command line by giving options a,b,c by toolic (Bishop) on Apr 06, 2010 at 17:16 UTC
Getopt::Long is a standard way of parsing command line options in Perl.	[reply]
Re: User input from a command line by giving options a,b,c by cdarke (Prior) on Apr 06, 2010 at 19:28 UTC
It is really quite easy, and you would get the most from this forum if you tried to figure it out for yourself by reading the links. However, I will give you a start using Getopt::Std, which has less features than Getopt::Long but might be enough. It can be used in a couple of different ways, in this example we get the options set on the command-line into a hash: `use warnings; use strict; use Getopt::Std; my %options; getopts('abc', \%options); while (my ($key, $value) = each %options) { print "Option: $key, value: $value\n" } print "Remaining arguments: @ARGV\n";` [download] Here is a selection of command-line calls and results: `C:\>gash.pl -ac Option: c, value: 1 Option: a, value: 1 Remaining arguments: C:\>gash.pl -ab fred jim Option: a, value: 1 Option: b, value: 1 Remaining arguments: fred jim C:\>gash.pl -c -a fred jim Option: c, value: 1 Option: a, value: 1 Remaining arguments: fred jim` [download]	[reply] [d/l] [select]