Arguments parsing

[fgrazi]

Hi there, congratulations on the Shell. I greatly appreciate its architecture but need help understanding the command arguments parsing.

Consider this simple example:

  @ShellMethod(value = "Join multiple arguments")
  public String concat(@ShellOption(value = "", help = "Items to be concatenated", arity = 1000) String args[],
                       @ShellOption(value = {"--upper", "-u"}, help="Convert to upper cases") boolean upperCase,
                       @ShellOption(defaultValue = "", help="Arguments separator") String separator) {
    String result = Arrays.asList(args).stream().collect(Collectors.joining(separator));
    return upperCase ? result.toUpperCase() : result;
  }

Now if I execute:

shell:>concat a b c -u
ABC

But if I execute (as usual in UNIX environment):

shell:>concat -u a b c
Missing mandatory option --, Items to be concatenated.

It does not work.

Does it mean that options (preceded by keyword) shall necessarily follow arguments?

Also, defining the arity as 1000 to indicate 0 or more is unclear. I could use this by inspecting the code and noticing it would be mapped to 0 - 1000. Without being pretentious, I suggest defining some symbolic constants for the annotation (for example, ONE_OR_MORE = -2).

Thanks in advance.

[fgrazi]

I also noticed another strange behavior:

@ShellMethod
  public String test(@ShellOption(arity = 1000) String[] query,
                      @ShellOption(defaultValue =  ShellOption.NULL) String file) {
    for (int i = 0; i < query.length; i++) {
      System.out.println(i + "->[" + query[i] + ']');
    }
    return Arrays.stream(query).collect(Collectors.joining(" "));
  }

...
shell:>test "test a, b"
0->[test a]
1->[b]
test a b

Why is it parsed and the comma removed if I pass a single argument within double braces (single braces make no difference)?