Specify command line arguments like name=value pairs for shell script

Question

Is it possible to pass command line arguments to shell script as name value pairs, something like

myscript action=build module=core

and then in my script, get the variable like $action and process it?

I know that $1....and so on can be used to get variables, but then won't be name value like pairs. Even if they are, then the developer using the script will have to take care of declaring variables in the same order. I do not want that.

Answer 1

This worked for me:

for ARGUMENT in "$@"
do
   KEY=$(echo $ARGUMENT | cut -f1 -d=)

   KEY_LENGTH=${#KEY}
   VALUE="${ARGUMENT:$KEY_LENGTH+1}"

   export "$KEY"="$VALUE"
done

echo "STEPS = $STEPS"
echo "REPOSITORY_NAME = $REPOSITORY_NAME"

Usage

bash my_scripts.sh  STEPS="ABC" REPOSITORY_NAME="stackexchange"

Console result :

STEPS = ABC
REPOSITORY_NAME = stackexchange

STEPS and REPOSITORY_NAME are ready to use in the script.

It does not matter what order the arguments are in.

HTH

Answer 2

It's quite an old question, but still valid I have not found the cookie cut solution. I combined the above answers. For my needs I created this solution; this works even with white space in the argument's value.

Save this as argparse.sh

#!/bin/bash

: ${1?
  'Usage:
  $0 --<key1>="<val1a> <val1b>" [ --<key2>="<val2a> <val2b>" | --<key3>="<val3>" ]'
}

declare -A args
while [[ "$#" > "0" ]]; do
  case "$1" in 
    (*=*)
        _key="${1%%=*}" &&  _key="${_key/--/}" && _val="${1#*=}"
        args[${_key}]="${_val}"
        (>&2 echo -e "key:val => ${_key}:${_val}")
        ;;
  esac
  shift
done
(>&2 echo -e "Total args: ${#args[@]}; Options: ${args[@]}")

## This additional can check for specific key
[[ -n "${args['path']+1}" ]] && (>&2 echo -e "key: 'path' exists") || (>&2 echo -e "key: 'path' does NOT exists");

@Example: Note, arguments to the script can have optional prefix --

./argparse.sh --x="blah"
./argparse.sh --x="blah" --yy="qwert bye"
./argparse.sh x="blah" yy="qwert bye"

Some interesting use cases for this script:

./argparse.sh --path="$(ls -1)"
./argparse.sh --path="$(ls -d -1 "$PWD"/**)"

Above script created as gist, Refer: argparse.sh