How to pass and read arguments to a lua program?

Question

Equivalent to main(int argc, char*argv[]) of C. For example: ./foo.lua -a -b how do I read -a and -b from foo.lua program?

Answer 1

Command line arguments are in the global table arg. See here for details. Since there is no argparse/optparse library you will need to handle the logic for short and long switches yourself.

Answer 2

The command line arguments are also available as real arguments to the script, which are vararg functions. So you can do:

local x,y,z = ...

If you need to loop over the command line arguments, use the arg table.