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up vote 4 down vote favorite

Is there any easy way to pass (receive) named parameters to a shell script?

For example, 

my_script -p_out '/some/path' -arg_1 '5'

And inside my_script.sh receive them as:

# I believe this notation does not work, but is there anything close to it?
p_out=$ARGUMENTS['p_out']
arg1=$ARGUMENTS['arg_1']

printf "Argument p_out is %s" "$p_out"
printf "Argument arg_1 is %s" "$arg_1"

Is this possible in Bash or Zsh?

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1  
have a look at docopt – it helps with named parameters and does input validation, too –  Beat May 14 at 21:55
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3 Answers

up vote 6 down vote accepted

The probably closest syntax to that is:

p_out='/some/path' arg_1='5' my_script
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2  
Related to this, if the -k option is set in the calling shell, then my_script p_out='/some/path' arg_1='5' has the same effect. (All arguments in the form of an assignment are added to the environment, not just those assignments preceding the command.) –  chepner May 14 at 22:55
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up vote 5 down vote

If you don't mind being limited to single-letter argument names i.e. my_script -p '/some/path' -a5, then in bash you could use the built-in getopts, e.g.

#!/bin/bash

while getopts ":a:p:" opt; do
  case $opt in
    a) p_out="$OPTARG"
    ;;
    p) arg_1="$OPTARG"
    ;;
    \?) echo "Invalid option -$OPTARG" >&2
    ;;
  esac
done

printf "Argument p_out is %s\n" "$p_out"
printf "Argument arg_1 is %s\n" "$arg_1"

Then you can do

$ ./my_script -p '/some/path' -a5
Argument p_out is 5
Argument arg_1 is /some/path

There is a helpful Small getopts tutorial or you can type help getopts at the shell prompt.

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up vote 1 down vote

With zsh, you'd use zparseopts:

#! /bin/zsh -
zmodload zsh/zutil
zparseopts -A ARGUMENTS -p_out: -arg_1:

p_out=$ARGUMENTS[--p_out]
arg1=$ARGUMENTS[--arg_1]

printf 'Argument p_out is "%s"\n' "$p_out"
printf 'Argument arg_1 is "%s"\n' "$arg_1"

But you'd call the script with myscript --p_out foo.

Note that zparseopts doesn't support abbreviating long options or the --p_out=foo syntax like GNU getopt(3) does.

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