Partial Argument Parse and Passing in Bash

Let’s say we want to augment an existing terminal command (like for example wget). We then want to be able to add or edit command line options. The rest of this post provides an example that hopefully you can use in your bash script.

#!/bin/bash

# Custom help function
show_help() {
  echo "Usage: custom_command [arguments]"
  echo " --name <name>"
  echo " --flag_example"
  echo " <additional arguments to be passed along>"
  exit 0
}

# Defaults for our custom flags or parameters.
name=""
flag_example=0

# Loop through and take out our custom parameters
# from the parameter list.
i=0
numargs=$#
while test $i -lt "$numargs"
do
  case "$1" in
    "--help")
      show_help
      ;;
    "--name")
      shift
      name=$1
      ;;
    "--flag_example")
      flag_example=1
      ;;
    *)
      set -- "$@" "$1"
      ;;
  esac
  shift
  i=$((i+1))
done

# Do something here using our custom parameters

# Pass our non-custom parameters to the application
wget "$@"