Overview

Every command stems around a verb which acts as the main action the command is performing. In contrast to field flags, which are preceded by -- for -, arguments are passed as normal arguments. They can be interleaved with normal flags.

Arguments can be:

• required. These need to be provided by the user, or have a default value
• list arguments, which means that they gobble up the rest of the arguments

When parsing the arguments, the parser will try to match the command-line arguments to the command's arguments. Once the arguments run out, the parser will try to match the remaining arguments to their default values.

Finally, leftover arguments are assigned to a potential list argument.

• Required arguments are always placed before optional arguments.
• Fields accepting list inputs should not directly follow each other.

Required Fields

Required arguments are indicated by angle brackets <>. These arguments must be specified for a command to run successfully. For example:

command <filename>

This indicates that the command requires a filename to be specified for it to run properly.

Optional Fields

Optional arguments can be identified by the square brackets []. These arguments may be skipped, and the command may still run successfully. For example:

command <filename> [directory]

Here the directory is optional. If not provided, the command will still execute, but with certain default settings.

List Fields

Some commands may accept a list of inputs for certain arguments. This is symbolized by an ellipsis ... following the argument.

command <filename> [tags...]

In this case, the tags argument can accept a list of values.

Default Values

Fields may come with default values. These can be identified by text following the format default: value. This means that if you do not provide a value for this argument, the system will use the default value.

command <filename> [directory (default: home)]

This command implies that if no directory is specified, the system uses the home directory as a default.