Can I create an option name with hyphens in apache commons cli?

Question

I am trying to set Option name with hyphens in it like "source-files" using the Apache Commons CLI java library.

Option option = new Option("source-files", true, "List of source files")

I get this error,

java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: opt contains illegal character value '-'
at org.apache.commons.cli.OptionValidator.validateOption(OptionValidator.java:73)
at org.apache.commons.cli.Option.<init>(Option.java:123)
at org.apache.commons.cli.Option.<init>(Option.java:105)

Which means I cannot use an option name with a hyphen in it, which is the standard with unix commands. I noticed that Commons CLI documentation mentions a hyphenated option name in one their examples. Am I missing something here?

Answer 1

You can only use - in the "long name":

options.addOption("S", "source-files", true, "List of source files")

If you want to only have the long name, you may need to use OptionBuilder (not sure).