Is there a standard technique to implement command line options within programme for CLI?

Question

I am writing a command line tool in C++ that takes several arguments, some of them file names but also option parameters.

Is there a standard way to parse and implement these options? A simple way would be to clean the input and use a map to convert it to an integer and use a switch statement in the main.cpp. But that strikes me as leading to a bloated main.cpp. How do other command line tools, like vim, sed etc. deal with interpreting options?

I would be much grateful if you could point me to some examples or documentation.

Many thanks!

Answer 1

Is there a standard way to parse and implement these options?

Yes, there is. Along the Posix Standard there's the getopts() function you can use to do the parsing.

Regarding the c++ standard there aren't any libraries to support command line arguments parsing.
Though there's boost::program_options you can use to make it easier to define and parse any kind of program parameters in a typesafe manner.
This uses map like structures to store the parsed values.