Java: Command Line Arguments Parsing

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This tutorial will guide you through how to do command line argument parsing easily. For this example we will use Commons-Cli package.

pom.xml

<properties>
	<commonscli.version>1.4</commonscli.version>
</properties>
 
<dependencies>
	<!-- https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/commons-cli/commons-cli -->
	<dependency>
		<groupId>commons-cli</groupId>
		<artifactId>commons-cli</artifactId>
		<version>${commonscli.version}</version>
	</dependency>
</dependencies>

Imports

import org.apache.commons.cli.CommandLine;
import org.apache.commons.cli.CommandLineParser;
import org.apache.commons.cli.DefaultParser;
import org.apache.commons.cli.HelpFormatter;
import org.apache.commons.cli.Option;
import org.apache.commons.cli.Options;
import org.apache.commons.cli.ParseException;

Main

public static void main(String[] args) {
	final Options options = new Options();
	Option startOption = new Option("s", "start", true, "Start the process.");
	startOption.setRequired(true);
	options.addOption(startOption);
 
	final HelpFormatter help = new HelpFormatter();
	final CommandLineParser parser = new DefaultParser();
	CommandLine cmd = null;
 
	try {
		cmd = parser.parse(options, args);
	} catch (final ParseException e) {
		help.printHelp("java -jar myApp.jar", "My Header", options, "-s must be specified");
		return;
	}
 
	final boolean doStart = Boolean.valueOf(cmd.getOptionValue("s"));
 
	if (doStart) {
		//Do my work here
	}
}