Pass an argument with multiple letter flags

Question

My question is about a script I was asked to write for college so it's H/W, but I am stuck and haven't figured out a solution.

I am trying to get the arguments of

./tool.sh -f persons.dat -id <id> 

because I want the in order to display the data of the person.

tool.sh is my program and persons.dat is a file with data of people that looks like this

3601|Wang|Lin|male|1981-01-02|2010-03-14T19:06:18.373+0000|1.10.108.68|Firefox

id|lastName|firstName|gender|birthday|creationDate|locationIP|browserUsed

I know I can't use getopts beacause id is a two letter flag and I could pass it manually but I am asked not to take the position in consideration so:

./tool.sh -f persons.dat -id <id> 

and:

./tool.sh -id <id> -f persons.dat

should be of the same use

Any ideas?

Answer 1

If your problem is limited to those 2 options, something of the like:

usage() {
echo "tools.sh -id <id> -f <file>"
echo "note: order of options is not important"

}

if [ $# -ne 4 ]; then
    echo "Wrong number of arguments"
    usage   
    exit 1
fi

if [ "$1" = "-f" -a "$3" = "-id" ]; then
    file="$2"
    id="$4"
elif [ "$1" = "-id" -a "$3" = "-f" ]
then
    file="$4"
    id="$2"
else
    echo "Wrong syntax!"
    usage
    exit 1
fi

Then, you can parse your file with awk:

awk -F'|' -v id="$id" '$1==id{printf "ID: "$1"\nUser: "$2" "$3"\nGender: "$4"\nBorn: "$5"\nCreation Date: "$6"\nLocation IP: "$7"\nBrowser used: "$8"\n"}' $file

if [ $? -eq 0 ]
then
    exit 0
else
    echo "Something went \"woopsie!\""
    exit 1
fi

To make it better, you could also check that id is a number and that persons.dat is indeed a file somewhere in your PATH...

Answer 2

awk -F\| 'NR==1{
for(j=1;j<=NF;j++)
Arr[j]=$j;
next
}
{
printf("./tool.sh -f file --edit");
for(i=1;i<=NF;i++)
printf("%s %s ",Arr[i],$i)
}
{
printf("\n")
}' persons.dat