Trollop FAQ ----------- Q: Whither Trollop? A: There are more than a few pre-existing commandline argument processing libraries for Ruby. I was never too happy with any of them. They all seemed to want me to type way too much for what I wanted to get done. I just wanted to parse some options and be done with it. Q: Whither "Trollop"? A: No reason. Just thought it sounded funny. Q: Why does Trollop disallow numeric short argument names, like '-1' and '-9'? A: Because it's ambiguous whether these are arguments or negative integer or floating-point parameters to arguments. E.g., what about "-f -3". Is that a negative three parameter to -f, or two separate parameters? I could be very clever and detect when there are no arguments that require floating-point parameters, and allow such short option names in those cases, but I'd rather be simple and consistent. Q: Why does Trollop disallow options appearing multiple times, despite the POSIX standard allowing it? A: Because basically I think it's confusing, and more often than not, a symptom of you making a mistake (e.g. getting lost in a long command line and accidentally setting the same thing twice.) Given that, I really don't see that much advantage to "-vvvvv" over "-v 5", so Trollop will produce an error if it happens.