About this mini-article series. Each day for 24 days, I will be reviewing a module that parses command-line options (such module is usually under the Getopt::* namespace). First article is here.

Getopt::Std is the other core module that comes with Perl when it comes to parsing command-line options. The problem is, it only supports one-letter options. Since Getopt::Long also supports one-letter options, there is really little or no reason for you to use Getopt::Std.

But Getopt::Std is still the second-most popular CPAN module when it comes to parsing command-line options, if you look at the number of reverse dependencies it has (167, after Getopt::Long which has 1127). Maybe this is because some people prefer using only short options. Also note that since these two modules are core, some distributions do not specify them as dependencies. Which means that the number of reverse dependencies for these two are actually higher.

One advantage of using Getopt::Std is its dead-simple API. You just call getopts() and user-specified options will be collected in $opt_* variables. Perfect if you have a short script that only accepts a few one-letter options.

Tab completion. If you have a Getopt::Std-based CLI script, your users can use shcompgen to get tab completion, because shcompgen now supports detecting Getopt::Std-based scripts and activating tab completion for such scripts. It only supports completing option names though. To be more useful (completing option values and arguments) you will need to use one of the other Getopt modules, e.g. Getopt::Long::Complete.