Free Getopt

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Please read the file LICENSE for the terms of use and distribution of this
software.
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"getopt" is a library that allows a parsing of arguments passed
to a program.  This is a useful library used in many software.
There are many versions of the getopt library available, two
popular versions being the BSD getopt and the GNU getopt.

BSD getopt is somewhat old, dated, and isn't very user-friendly.
The GNU getopt is great, except the user license doesn't let you
statically link the library to a proprietary software.  This
is usually not a problem on modern operating systems that allow
dynamic links to libraries, but sometimes you just gotta link
the library statically for one reason or another.  That's where
Free Getopt steps in.

Functionally, this getopt library is equivalent to GNU's getopt
library (the short option version, not the long one) in almost
every aspect.  The only exception is how the "optind" variable
increments.  Apparently due to different algorithms used by my
program and the GNU getopt, the "optind" changes quite differently
between our two software.  I personally find my algorithm to be
quite elegant; I couldn't tell you about the GNU version since
I never looked at its source.

GNU's getopt_long support is in progress.

This library was deliberately left in non-library (not in
*.lib, *.so, or *.a) form because it's most likely to be
statically-linked in various platforms, and linking it
directly from source is probably the most straight-forward
way to use the software in any platform.

I hope you find this software useful.

Mark K. Kim

$Header: /cvsroot/freegetopt/freegetopt/README,v 1.2 2003/10/26 03:10:19 vindaci Exp $

