Jakarta Commons Cookbook

7.1. Obtaining Commons CLI

Problem

You need to use Commons CLI (Command-Line Interface) to parse an application’s command-line arguments.

Solution

Download Commons CLI 1.0. Following the steps outlined in Recipt 1.1, download “Commons CLI 1.0” instead of Commons Lang. The Commons CLI archive—cli-1.0.zip—contains a file named commons-cli-1.0.jar; place this JAR file in your classpath, and you are ready to use Commons CLI in your application.

Discussion

Commons CLI provides a standard mechanism for parsing command-line arguments. Contained in the org.apache.commons.cli package, CLI provides a set of classes that can parse command-line arguments containing optional arguments, arguments with parameters, and short and long arguments. As shown in this chapter, CLI also provides a mechanism for printing out usage information.

See Also

For more information about Commons CLI, see the Commons CLI project page (http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/cli).

For C developers, see the getopt and argp in the GNU C Library. For more information, see the section “Parsing Program Arguments” in the GNU C Library manual (http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/index.html).