OSF DCE Administration Guide--Core Components

OSF DCE Administration Guide—Core Components

The procedure relies on arguments passed to it by the calling script. The parseargs

procedure requires the following inputs:

parse_options the argument table (arg_table) describing the parsing options. The

parse_options argument can consist of ﬁve elements, as in the

script’s top-level argument table, or four elements as in lower-level

argument tables for called procedures within a script. The two

syntaxes for parse_options are

verb command variable command_name "help string"

-options type variable "help string"

verb Provides top-level parsing. Typically an

operation contains an object and a verb.

The verb portion generally calls another

procedure.

command A keyword indicating that the procedure

being deﬁned is a verb of an object.

variable The name of the variable that holds the

value of the option. When parsing verbs,

the variable is named function call. When

parsing options, the variable is named for

the option being parsed. For example, if the

option name is -alias, the variable is named

alias.

command_name The procedure name to store in the variable.

help string The string that describes the use of the verb

or option.

-options The actual string value of the option to be

parsed such as -attribute or -mypwd.

type The type of variable to be associated with -

option. Acceptable types are integer,

string, ﬂoat, boolean, command, and help.

local_args The arguments to be parsed. The parseargs procedure extracts all

of the recognized entries into a list and resets local_args with the

values that were not parsed (or not parsable). For instance, a top-

level command like user create includes options that are parsed

later when the procedure implementing the create operation is

invoked within the script.

args One of two ﬂags:

-found_one Tells the parser to return when one

procedure argument has been found. In

user create, for example, the parser would

return after one create command had been

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