How to behave like ls?

[samhocevar]

The GNU ls utility allows its flags to be provided anywhere in the commandline, e.g.:

ls -l file1 file2 file3
ls file1 file2 file3 -l

If I understand correctly, .remaining(); does not allow that. Is there a workaround for this or another way to do it?

[p-ranav]

If you know the number of "file" arguments, then you can use specify nargs and place the optional argument -l where ever in the list.

But if you need remaining, at the moment this is not possible. See here.

NOTE: Remember to place all optional arguments BEFORE the remaining argument. If the optional argument is placed after the remaining arguments, it too will be deemed remaining:

$ ./compiler foo.cpp bar.cpp baz.cpp -o main
5 arguments provided
foo.cpp
bar.cpp
baz.cpp
-o
main

I'll keep this issue open as it is worth looking into this to see if it is feasible in the current implementation.

[p-ranav]

@samhocevar There's a new release of argparse that will support this feature request. Hope this helps.

Regards,

[samhocevar]

Thanks for taking the time to let me know. I ended up not using argparse but it seemed pretty clean at the time, so I think I will evaluate it again.