Parsing Program Arguments (The GNU C Library)

#### 26.1.2 Parsing Program Arguments ¶

If the syntax for the command line arguments to your program is simple enough, you can simply pick the arguments off from argv by hand. But unless your program takes a fixed number of arguments, or all of the arguments are interpreted in the same way (as file names, for example), you are usually better off using `getopt` (see Parsing program options using `getopt`) or `argp_parse` (see Parsing Program Options with Argp) to do the parsing.

`getopt` is more standard (the short-option only version of it is a part of the POSIX standard), but using `argp_parse` is often easier, both for very simple and very complex option structures, because it does more of the dirty work for you.