Apache Commons CLI Tutorial

CLI stands for command Line Interface. Commons CLI support different kinds of options.

a.   POSIX like options (ie. tar -zxvf foo.tar.gz)

b.   GNU like long options (ie. du --human-readable --max-depth=1)

c.    Java like properties (ie. java -Djava.awt.headless=true -Djava.net.useSystemProxies=true Foo)

d.   Short options with value attached (ie. gcc -O2 foo.c)

e.   long options with single hyphen (ie. ant -projecthelp)

By using Commons CLI library, you can generate help for any command line tool, parse the command line arguments, query the command line arguments.

Typical CLI output looks like below.

usage: FileCopy -i <FILE PATH> -o <FILE PATH> [-help] [-version] [-quiet] [-verbose] [-debug] [-lang
       <LANGUAGE>]
     -i,--input <FILE PATH>          input file to read data from
     -o,--output <FILE PATH>         output file to write the final result
     -help                           print this message
     -version                        print the version information and exit
     -quiet                          be extra quiet
     -verbose                        be extra verbose
     -debug                          print debugging information
     -lang,--language <LANGUAGE>     Encoding Langauge

Later posts explain each and every concept in detail.

Specify single command line option

Set the display name for the argument

Define options using builder

Options class

Boolean options

Add multiple arguments to an option

Setting the compulsory options

Print command line argument in the order you inserted

Parsing command line options

Group mutually Exclusive options

Previous                                                 Next                                                 Home