"command options" suggests several distinct topics:
   * tclsh and wish arguments
   * command-line options (as seen through $::argv) of Tcl-coded applications
   * idioms for parsing variable (args) arguments seen by pure-Tcl [proc]s.
Certain considerations are common to all these, and are convenient to treat here in a unified way.


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   * getopts [ftp://ftp.neosoft.com/languages/tcl/alcatel/code/tclGetOpts.tar.gz] [[mildly buggy]]
   * clig (command line interpreter generator) [http://wsd.iitb.fhg.de/~kir/clighome/]
   * [Extral]'s args_parse, cmd_parse, and so on
   * super getopts [ftp://ftp.Lehigh.EDU/pub/evap/evap-2.x/evap-2.2.tar.gz]
   * optcl
   * [Laurent Demailly]'s opt
   * jstools includes an ... [[?]] package for argument parsing
   * yaap
   * GenParseCmdLine
   * [cmdline] in [tcllib].  This is probably the most standard and widely-used of these packages.
   * ::tcl::OptProc is shipped with Tcl, but deprecated.
   * optparse is in 0.4 of tcllib.  It's also deprecated, in favor of cmdline.  [[*Is* it in tcllib0.4?  In any case, it's deprecated ...]]
   * argp (optional argument parser) parses commandline arguments and optional arguments of procs [http://www.chevreux.org/projects_tcl.html]
    * ''ad_proc'' [http://www.arsdigita.com/api-doc/proc-view?proc=ad%5fproc&source_p=1] from the ACS [http://www.openacs.org/]

    * Doug Simpson posted [http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&safe=off&frame=right&th=b763b6651697f176] his "groom" to comp.lang.tcl.

   * There is argument processing code at http://www.MapFree.com/sbf/tcl/scripts1.html by jazimmer .


   * Michael Kraus has code in http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/mmg_kraus/mkGenMan.htm for processing arguments to procedures.

   * [The Simple Library] [http://simplelib.bobsville.com] includes both a package for command arguments handling including typed arguments (with optional tun-time checking) and options (SimpleProc, [http://simplelib.bobsville.com/packages/SimpleProc.txt]) and a very powerful command line options parser with too many features to list here  (SimpleOptions, [http://simplelib.bobsville.com/packages/SimpleOptions.txt]).

   * SNTL at http://www.csua.berkeley.edu/%7Esls/woa/distrib/ contains code for command line argument processing as well as many other items.  It was written by [Sam Shen].


   * YAAP is Yet Another Argument Parsing utility and can be found at ftp://ftp.neosoft.com/languages/tcl/sorted/packages-7.6/devel/yaap-0.9.shar.gz .  It is a template based argument parsing utility inspired by XtGetApplicationResources() .


   * evaluate_parameters at ftp://ftp.Lehigh.EDU/pub/evap/evap-2.x/evap-2.2.tar.Z is a Perl program that processes command line arguments in a simple consistent manner performing type-checking, multi-levels of help, etc.  a Tcl/Tk GUI wrapper around one's Perl or C program to gather the command line arguments interactively.




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Question: In C, for Tcl, using the newer objc, objv API, how do I parse options? I would have thought people would need to do this all the time, but I can't find anything. Needs to handle args, options, required optional etc. Speed is high on the priority list...

If you can use the Tk library, try Tk_SetOptions and its assorted support functions.  It would be nice if something like this were in the Tcl library, for those times when one doesn't have Tk around.  A pure-Tcl solution might be to do the option handling in Tcl, passing a fixed number of arguments to the C code, but that might not meet your speed requirements.

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[[Many people write their own "... -arg1 val1 -arg2 val2 ..." processing, because it's
so easy to use Tcl associative arrays (see "[Arrays / Hash Maps]") simply as the "optional arguments" section in [Tcl Gems] does ...]]












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Here is the start of some code to show at least one method of doing
command line parsing.  Hopefully people will contribute other samples
as appropriate.  

 # If this script was executed, and not just "source"'d, handle argv
 if { [string compare [info script] $argv0] == 0} {
      while {[llength $argv] > 0 } { 
         set flag [lindex $argv 0]
         switch -- $flag {
          "-bool" {
                  set bool 1
                  set argv [lrange $argv 1 end]
                  }
          "-option" {
                  set value [lindex $argv 1]
                  set argv [lrange $argv 2 end]
                   }
           default { break }
      }
    }
 }

 foreach file $argv {
    puts "[format "file: %s" $file]"
 }
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A quick and dirty way uses one-liners like this:
 if [regexp " -x" $::argv] {# do the X thing} ;# RS
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If your values come in pairs (like -option value), I usually use the following code for parsing them:

 foreach {option value} $argument_list {
   switch -glob -- $option {
     -opt*      {set opt $val}
     -otheropt* {set otheropt $val}
     default    {error "Unkown option $option!"}
   }
 }
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A related topic:  "[Syntax parsing in Tcl]".

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