How do I handle switches in a shell script?

Unfortunately there really is no simple way to do this in a shell script. There are various getopt utilities out there that attempt to make this easier. However,

• getopt (no s) is an external command but there are too many implementations of this in the wild for anyone to be able to safely rely on it in a portable shell script. If you can guarantee that the GNU version exists though, that will support GNU-style --long options.

• getopts (note the s) has the advantage of both being a shell built-in (no external command needed so it is faster AND can set shell variables for you) as well as being specified by POSIX (so it is much more portable). Unfortunately it doesn't support long options. There is an interesting approach that does some preprocessing on the argument list to translate long options into short ones that getopts recognizes.

See also this getopts tutorial courtesy of the bash-hackers wiki and this question from stackoverflow.

I assume you're using bash or similar. An example:

all=false
long=false

while getopts ":hal" option; do
  case $option in
    h) echo "usage: $0 [-h] [-a] [-l] file ..."; exit ;;
    a) all=true ;;
    l) long=true ;;
    ?) echo "error: option -$OPTARG is not implemented"; exit ;;
  esac
done

# remove the options from the positional parameters
shift $(( OPTIND - 1 ))

ls_opts=()
$all && ls_opts+=( -a )
$long && ls_opts+=( -l )

# now, do it
ls "${ls_opts[@]}" "$@"

You have to write a cycle to parse the parameters. Indeed you can use getopts command to do it easily.

This is a simple example from getopts manual page:

aflag=
bflag=
while getopts ab: name
do
    case $name in
    a)    aflag=1;;
    b)    bflag=1
          bval="$OPTARG";;
    ?)    printf "Usage: %s: [-a] [-b value] args\n" $0
          exit 2;;
    esac
done
if [ ! -z "$aflag" ]; then
    printf "Option -a specified\n"
fi
if [ ! -z "$bflag" ]; then
    printf 'Option -b "%s" specified\n' "$bval"
fi
shift $(($OPTIND - 1))
printf "Remaining arguments are: %s\n" "$*"

I wrote a script recently for work that was versatile and allowed for multiple kinds of switches in any order. I can't disclose the full script for obvious legal reasons (not to mention I don't have it with me at the moment), but here's the meat of it.. you can put it in a subroutine and call it at the end of your script:

options () {

    if [ -n "$1" ]; then # test if any arguments passed - $1 will always exist
        while (( "$#" )); do  # process ALL arguments
            if [ "$1" = ^-t$ ]; then # -t short for "test"
                # do something here THEN shift the argument
                # shift removes it from $@ and reduces $# by
                # one if you supply no argument
                shift

            # we can also process multiple arguments at once
            elif [[ "$1" =~ ^--test=[:alnum:]{1,8}$ ]] && [[ "$2" =~ ^-t2$ ]] && [[ -n "$3" ]]; then # check for 3 arguments
                # do something more then remove them ALL from the arg list    
                shift 3
            else
                echo "No matching arguments!"
                echo "Usage: [script options list here]"
            fi
        done
    else
        echo "Usage: [script options list here]"
        exit 0
    fi
}

options "$@" # run options and loop through/process ALL arguments

I do recommend limiting your bash script to less than 400 lines/15k characters; my aforementioned script grew past this size and became greatly difficult to work on. I started rewriting it in Perl, which is much better suited for the task. Keep that in mind as you work on your scripts in bash. Bash is great for small scripts and oneliners, but anything more complex and you're better off writing it in Perl.

Note, I haven't test the above, so it probably doesn't work, but you get the general idea from it.