getStuff configs --force=all --out out.txt -v -a
[download]

As an example, you are implying that the "--out" option should be followed by a string argument (this is implied by the fact that in your list, you have the line "--out out.txt". But how can you possibly know that, given an arbitrary set of options? "--out" could simply be a boolean flag, not taking any additional arguments, and "out.txt" could be a file supplied as an argument to the program that you're running.

The point is, your post suggest no way of discerning this information, and w/o that, there's really no way we can help you parse the config options. And in fact, although I don't know what your script is trying to do, I would strongly discourage you from trying to parse the command line options to another program--unless you *are* that other program, you have no way of knowing what the options mean, and what arguments they take, etc.

Now, if you *do* know that information, then you can use Getopt::Long to parse the arguments, kind of like this:

    use Getopt::Long;
    use Data::Dumper;

    {
        local @ARGV = ("configs", "--force=all", "--out", "out.txt", "
+-v", "-a");
        GetOptions(\my %opts, "force=s", "out=s", "v", "a");
        print Dumper \%opts;
        print Dumper \@ARGV;
    }
[download]

$VAR1 = {
          'out' => 'out.txt',
          'a' => 1,
          'v' => 1,
          'force' => 'all'
        };
$VAR1 = [
          'configs'
        ];
[download]

    GetOptions(\my %opts, "force=s", "out", "v", "a");
[download]

$VAR1 = {
          'out' => 1,
          'a' => 1,
          'v' => 1,
          'force' => 'all'
        };
$VAR1 = [
          'configs',
          'out.txt'
        ];
[download]

What you want is GetOpt::Long. It will handle all your command line option needs.

I'm sorry, but I guess I wasn't clear about the situation. The arguments I'm trying to parse into the array are not arguments to my script, they're arguments to what will become a child process. So my script is getting them from a file that contains entries like the one in my original post, I can easily parse out the command name, but I'm having trouble getting the argument list into a form that I could pass to, say system() for example.

Thanks for the quick responses.
Ira.

"So... What do all these little arrows mean?" ~unknown

Do you know the format of the command lines that you will be getting from the file? If so, you can still use Getopt::Long or Getopt::Std if you localize @ARGV. Here's a bit of code I've used in the past to accomplish a similar task. This code uses Getopt::Std and the parse_cmd function returns a hash rather than an array so it doesn't meet IraTarball's exact specs, but it should be a nudge in the right direction. Here goes --

use strict;
use Getopt::Std;
use Data::Dumper;

sub parse_cmd{
    my $cmdline = shift;  
    local @ARGV;  
    @ARGV = split('\s+',$cmdline);
    shift @ARGV;
    my %options;
    getopts("x:y:z:abc", \%options);
    return %options;
}

my %opts = parse_cmd("someprg -x foo -y bar -z baz -ab");
print Dumper(\%opts);
[download]

Output from perl test.pl -f commandline.txt:

$VAR1 = {
          'x' => 'foo',
          'y' => 'bar',
          'a' => 1,
          'z' => 'baz',
          'b' => 1
        };
[download]

The logic would be the same for Getopt::Long or any of the other command line parsing options on cpan. Of course if you don't know what possible command line arguments are going to be passed, then you may want either look at something like Parse::RecDecent or look at the code of Getopt::Long.

----
Coyote

getStuff
configs
--force=all
--out out.txt
-v
-a

getOtherStuff
configs
--force=all
--out out2.txt
-v
-a

By separating each argument with a newline, you remove the need to write code to guess how the target program parses its arguments. You may now use <>'s paragraph mode to parse the arguments into an array:

$/ = "";
$" = ", ";
while (<FH>) {
  my @args = split /\n/, $_;
  print "args: @args\n";
}
[download]

prints:

args: getStuff, configs, --force=all, --out out.txt, -v, -a
args: getOtherStuff, configs, --force=all, --out out2.txt, -v

I'm writing a cron daemon in Perl.

O.K. not really, but sort of. At this point most people should be ready to ask "Why would you want to do something like that?" and the answer is basically, they want to pay me for it (could be worse, they could want me to encode everything Encoding Script).

So, this cron daemon does everything serially so I don't need to worry about any time specifiers, I just have the programs to run in a text file (crontab sort of thing). An entry might look like.

"getStuff" configs --force=all --out out.txt -v -a
[download]

'D:\Documents' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.
[download]

Here is a simple example of what I want.

while (<DATA>) {
    chomp;
    s/#.*$//; #Clear out comments

    next unless $_ && $_ ne '';

    m/^\s+\Q"\E(.+?)\Q"\E\s*(.*$)/;

    $task = $1;
    @args = split /\s+/, $2 if $2;

    for (my $i = 0; $i < $#args; $i++) {
       #Arguments begin with - or -- or +
       if ($args[$i] =~ /^[-\+]/) { 
       #if this looks like an argument, and the next one
       # doesn't, prepend the next thing to this one.
            $args[$i] .= " " . $args[$i+1] 
                if $args[$i+1] =~ /^[^-\+]/;
            #remove the thing from the args array.
            splice @args, $i+1, 1; 
       }
    }

    system ($task, @args);
    
}
[download]

If anyone has any suggestions...
Thanks,
Ira

"We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!"
~Vroomfondel (Hitch Hickers Guide to the Galaxy)