Once again I came across this very nice and certainly very helpful article on O’Reilly’s perl.com.
I personally really have been loving the Art of Command Line Processing for a very, very long time. During one of my last projects (it was actually mainly using p*th*n as programming language because of some rather weird and esoteric guy, who made it his personal mission to reinvent all the software spread over the bank from perl to p*th*n, especially the one he had written himself in quite unreadable perl a couple of years ago) I faced the task of prepping up a Java program from JasperForge.org, and the major value I added to that utility was to add command line processing using libraries from Apache. I actually offered Teodor Danciu of JasperSoft, JasperReports’ inventor and main developer, to contribute my version of that utility to JasperForge, but he wasn’t interested. I was rather sad. Maybe he will rethink that decision.
Update / 2010-09-19:
I think, I sort of “lied” 🙂 here. I didn’t “offer” Teodor that extension of his own OSS software, that he had developed himself and then published under LGPL, I rather asked him this:
Is there any interest in a “‘-D’ command line / getProperty” version of TextApp?
I would really love to even write and contribute a new and better version of my old approach, which was 100% based on OSS.
Can you imagine, that I get legally threatened for the above question, because an organisation thinks to possess rights on these minimal modifications I applied? We are talking literally about a couple of lines.