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content/blog/bashflags.md

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+---
+title: "Bash Flags"
+date: 2019-08-06T16:55:47-04:00
+draft: false
+---
+
+I was creating a bash script and was looking around for a solution for parsing command line arguments. [This StackOverflow post](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/192249/how-do-i-parse-command-line-arguments-in-bash) has a variety of different solutions available. I want to describe my favorite of these posts.
+
+[Inanc Gumus](https://stackoverflow.com/users/115363/inanc-gumus) proposed the following:
+
+```bash
+#!/bin/bash
+
+while [[ "$#" -gt 0 ]]; do case $1 in
+  -d|--deploy) deploy="$2"; shift;;
+  -u|--uglify) uglify=1;;
+  *) echo "Unknown parameter passed: $1"; exit 1;;
+esac; shift; done
+
+echo "Should deploy? $deploy"
+echo "Should uglify? $uglify"
+```
+
+Let me quickly describe what it does. While the number of arguments left to process is greater than zero....
+
+- Check to see if the argument matches any of the flags
+  - If it does...
+    - If the flag requires an additional argument grab it. Then discard an argument.
+  - If it doesn't. Error out.
+  - Then get rid of an argument.
+
+At the end of the while loop, you would've evaluated all the arguments!