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this is how they did it somewhat later in plan 9, with macro's:

ARGBEGIN{ default: usage(); case 'm': m = ARGF(); break; case 'p': pflag = 1; break; }ARGEND

https://github.com/9fans/plan9port/blob/master/include/libc.... https://github.com/9fans/plan9port/blob/master/src/cmd/mkdir...

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The Plan 9 solution always felt really logical imo.

i agree. too "clever", feels like a needless optimization. (optimizing for fewer keystrokes to type? or obscurity?)

btw, many of the plan 9 commands use slightly different/custom option parsing. probably for historic reasons.

No, this isn't clever at all. Its an optimization for when you need to write a lot of little utilities that need to parse arguments. It probably came out of a day of writing tools, and after the fifth time of rewriting that while/for loop someone got pissed and made that macro. I use this macro all the time on both 9front and unix because it makes parsing arguments trivial (and I don't use long options, but that's more because I'm a plan 9/unix extremist than for any technical reasons).

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