7.4.4 Automatically Supported Options

AutoOpts provides automated support for five options. help and more-help are always provided. version is provided if version is defined in the option definitions. save-opts and load-opts are provided if at least one homerc is defined.

Below are the option names and flag values. The flags are activated if and only if at least one user-defined option also uses a flag value. These flags may be deleted or changed to characters of your choosing by specifying xxx-value = "y";, where xxx is one of the five names below and y is either empty or the character of your choice. For example, to change the help flag from ? to h, specify help-value = "h";; and to require that save-opts be specified only with its long option name, specify save-opts-value = "";.

`help -?'

This option will immediately invoke the USAGE() procedure and display the usage line, a description of each option with its description and option usage information. This is followed by the contents of the definition of the detail text macro.

`more-help -!'

This option is identical to the help option, except that it also includes the contents of the detail-file file (if provided and found), plus the output is passed through a pager program. (more by default, or the program identified by the PAGER environment variable.)

`version -v'

This will print the program name, title and version. If it is followed by the letter c and a value for copyright and owner have been provided, then the copyright will be printed, too. If it is followed by the letter n, then the full copyright notice (if available) will be printed.

`save-opts ->'

This option will cause the option state to be printed in RC/INI file format when option processing is done but not yet verified for consistency. The program will terminate successfully without running when this has completed. Note that for most shells you will have to quote or escape the flag character to restrict special meanings to the shell.

The output file will be the RC/INI file name (default or provided by rcfile) in the last directory named in a homerc definition

`load-opts -<'

This option will load options from the named file. They will be treated exactly as if they were loaded from the normally found RC/INI files, but will not be loaded until the option is actually processed. This can also be used within an RC/INI file causing them to nest.

It is ultimately intended that specifying the option, no-load-opts will suppress the processing of rc/ini files and environment variables. To do this, AutoOpts must first implement pre-scanning of the options, environment and rc files.