commandline

The best C# command line parser that brings standardized *nix getopt style, for .NET. Includes F# support

Command Line Languages & Compilers

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REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

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What it is

The best C# command line parser that brings standardized *nix getopt style, for .NET. Includes F# support

GitHub

Where it is used

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Also in these discussions

mono/mono · linked in 2 of the same discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year4 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2018-01-28 07:08:43 UTC to 2023-09-28 01:06:22 UTC.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

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Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Comments
2018	2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2	2
2019	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2020	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
2021	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2022	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2023	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1

What Hacker News says

2 sources

neilsimp1·May 3, 2018

Granted, I've only ever written CLI apps using this and nothing else, but I've written a few smaller CLI apps in C# using https://github.com/commandlineparser/commandline and found the library to be a pleasure to work with.

In What is the best language/framework to write CLIs in 2018?

userbinator·Jan 28, 2018

Extract this into its own function and you basically have getopt() --- the POSIX version, not the rather more bloaty GNU version that has sometimes-unexpected behaviour (like reordering arguments). If you like this sort of source code, I'd also recommend looking at the BSD standard utilities --- they have a similar simple and concise style. Yet there's still one small simplification that can be made: the condition in the inner loop doesn't need "!= '\0'". If there are many pure-binary options, then putting them in a bitflag is also an easy extension to the present code: char binopts[] = "abcdefg"; char *opt; if(opt = strchr(binopts, *s)) options |= 1 << (optidx - opt); else // put the switch(*s) here Nowadays they just haul in the software weenies with their fancy objects and methods. Lost is the subtle art of m

Read the rest

anipulating arrays of pointers to strings of characters. Indeed, compare with the "modern" way of doing it: https://github.com/commandlineparser/commandline/tree/master... ...or something slightly simpler (because it's only one file!): https://github.com/mono/mono/blob/master/mcs/class/Mono.Opti... It may seem like an exaggeration, but in my experience working with C# and Java, code like that is the norm --- the core functionality is obscured by being scattered amongst a large amount of "fluff" and it's hard to get the whole picture of how it works because the flow jumps around so much. In contrast, the C code in this article can be understood by just staring at it for a little bit --- the entire functionality is contained within less than a dozen lines.

In How Old School C Programmers Process Arguments