Commons CLI

The Apache Commons CLI library provides an API for parsing command line options passed to programs. It's also able to print help messages detailing the options available for a command line tool.

Commons CLI supports different types of options:

• POSIX like options (ie. tar -zxvf foo.tar.gz)
• GNU like long options (ie. du --human-readable --max-depth=1)
• Java like properties (ie. java -Djava.awt.headless=true -Djava.net.useSystemProxies=true Foo)
• Short options with value attached (ie. gcc -O2 foo.c)
• long options with single hyphen (ie. ant -projecthelp)

A typical help message displayed by Commons CLI looks like this:

usage: ls -A,--almost-all          do not list implied . and .. -a,--all                 do not hide entries starting with . -B,--ignore-backups      do not list implied entried ending with ~ -b,--escape              print octal escapes for nongraphic characters    --block-size 
     
         use SIZE-byte blocks -c                       with -lt: sort by, and show, ctime (time of last                          modification of file status information) with                          -l:show ctime and sort by name otherwise: sort                          by ctime -C                       list entries by columns     
     

Check out the page for a detailed presentation.

CLI 2?

Commons CLI 1.0 was formed from the merger of ideas and code from three different libraries - Werken, Avalon and Optz. In dealing with the bugs and the feature requests a freshly designed and not backwards compatible CLI 2 was created in 2004, but never finished or released.

The current plan is to continue to maintain the 1.x line. The CLI2 work may be found in the Commons Sandbox.

Documentation

A full is available as are various .

The Javadoc API documents are available online:

The can be .

Releases

The latest version is v1.2. -

For previous releases, see the .