About the Commons CLI Library

This wiki site is used for discussion of topics associated with the commons-cli project whose home page is http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/cli

News

Release 2.0 - Update

We are currently working on the final touches of releasing the 2.0 release. The tasks that remain are to improve code coverage, review and complete javadoc, and complete user documentation.

Bad 1.0 release on Ibiblio (Maven)

Release 1.0 occurred in Nov 2002.

Due to an unfortunate accident, the 1.0 jar file published on ibiblio at http://www.ibiblio.org/maven/commons-cli/jars was overwritten at some point by a snapshot of later code, i.e. file commons-cli-1.0.jar became a snapshot of the trunk code at some later time (possibly 29 Jan 2004). The ibiblio repository of jar files is the default location that the Maven build tool uses to automatically download dependencies; therefore any project that uses Maven to build code which declares a dependency on commons-cli 1.0 may have downloaded and cached the incorrect file.

The binary and source distribution downloads available via the download pages of Apache or its mirrors is, and always has been the correct 1.0 release.

The file in question can be found at http://www.ibiblio.org/maven/commons-cli/jars

The md5 checksum of the valid 1.0 jar is: f6feeb3b3d95f7d09180fd71e96cead4 and its size is: 30117 bytes.
The md5 checksum of the invalid 1.0 jar is: 5cb21f532ab921134751b4b6e4807be4 and its size is: 32377 bytes

The snapshot which was accidentally published on ibiblio contains a number of API differences from the actual 1.0 release. Most obviously, the snapshot jar contains classes OptionValidator and Util which are not present in the real 1.0 release.

Resolution

The old 1.0 jar was renamed to commons-cli-20040117.000000.jar and a correct commons-cli-1.0.jar put in place.

Resources

[wiki:/FAQ The Frequently Asked Questions Page (FAQ)]

Articles

[http://www.devx.com/Java/Article/30117 Extend the JDK Classes with Jakarta Commons, Part III] - Explore Jakarta Commons components that enable you to parse arguments in a command-line application, connect to various file systems at the same time, allow an application to uniformly access configurations loaded from various sources, and pool any object.

Documentation Bugs

The Usage Scenarios documentation shows the PosixParser being used for the Ant example. This won't work. Either the BasicParser or GnuParser should be used for this example.

The [http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/cli/usage.html Usage Scenarios] documentation gives an API usage example for the Ant logfile option of:

Option logfile = OptionBuilder.withArgName( "file" )BR

                                .hasArg()

BR

                                .withDescription(  "use given file for log" )

BR

                                .create( "

file" );

This should instead be:

Option logfile = OptionBuilder.withArgName( "file" )BR

                                .hasArg()

BR

                                .withDescription(  "use given file for log" )

BR

                                .create( "

logfile" );

Similarly for the find option:

Option find = OptionBuilder.withArgName( "file" )BR

                                .hasArg()

BR

                                .withDescription(  "use given file for log" )

BR

                                .create( "

find" );

The section titled "Retrieving the argument value" shows an example of accessing the getOptionValue() method of Options. This is actually a method of CommandLine.

// get c option valueBR
String countryCode =options.getOptionValue("c"); // (Wrong if options is an instance of Options)