DESCRIPTION This module (GLEL for short) is a reimplementation of Getopt::Long (GL for short), but with much less features. It's an even more stripped down version of Getopt::Long::Less (GLL for short) and is perhaps less convenient to use for day-to-day scripting work. The main goal is minimum amount of code and small startup overhead. This module is an experiment of how little code I can use to support the stuffs I usually do with GL. Compared to GL and GLL, it: * has minimum Configure() support Only these configurations are known: pass_through, no_pass_through (default). GLEL is equivalent to GL in this mode: bundling, no_ignore_case, no_getopt_compat, gnu_compat, permute. No support for configuring via import options e.g.: use Getopt::Long qw(:config pass_through); * does not support increment (foo+) * no type checking (foo=i, foo=f, foo=s all accept any string) * does not support optional value (foo:s), only no value (foo) or required value (foo=s) * does not support desttypes (foo=s@) * does not support handler other than coderef (so no "foo=s" => \$scalar, "foo=s" => \@ary, only "foo=s" => sub { ... }) Also, in coderef handler, code will get a simple hash instead of a "callback" object as its first argument. * does not support hashref as first argument * does not support bool/negation (no foo!, so you have to declare both foo and no-foo manually) The result? Amount of code. GLEL 0.07 is about 175 lines of code, while GL is about 1500. Sure, if you really want to be minimalistic, you can use this single line of code to get options: @ARGV = grep { /^--([^=]+)(=(.*))?/ ? ($opts{$1} = $2 ? $3 : 1, 0) : 1 } @ARGV; and you're already able to extract --flag or --opt=val from @ARGV but you also lose a lot of stuffs like autoabbreviation, --opt val syntax support syntax (which is more common, but requires you specify an option spec), custom handler, etc. Startup overhead. Here's a sample startup overhead benchmark: # COMMAND: perl devscripts/bench-startup 2>&1 FUNCTIONS Configure(@configs | \%config) => hash Set configuration. Known configurations: * pass_through Ignore errors (unknown/ambiguous option) and still make GetOptions return true. * no_pass_through (default) Return old configuration data. To restore old configuration data you can pass it back to Configure(), e.g.: my $orig_conf = Getopt::Long::EvenLess::Configure("pass_through"); # ... Getopt::Long::EvenLess::Configure($orig_conf); GetOptions(%spec) => bool Shortcut for: GetOptionsFromArray(\@ARGV, %spec) GetOptionsFromArray(\@ary, %spec) => bool Get (and strip) options from @ary. Return true on success or false on failure (unknown option, etc). SEE ALSO Getopt::Long Getopt::Long::Less If you want more features intead of less, try Getopt::Long::More.