I don't think you're specifying the problem well enough. The line you give as an example of an argument list:

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

will *not* necessarily be parsed into a list like the one you posted. It is *entirely* up to the program who is receiving these arguments how to parse them, and what to do with them.

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]

This gives:

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

But just as a demonstration of what I was saying above, if we change that GetOptions spec to this:

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

we now get this:

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

Which just goes to show you that unless you know what, for example, "--out" means, you're really out of luck.

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