On Jul 14, 2015, at 4:23 AM, mmann78@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> I started looking at the long options, but I thought they also needed a corresponding mnemonic letter as well.
No - part of the whole reason for long options is to give you an escape when you run out of the subset of ASCII characters not used as shell metacharacters.
In getopt_long(), they do need a numerical value for the switch statement, but the value returned by getopt_long() is an int, so there's plenty of room for numerical values that aren't char values. We just #define the additional values for long options that don't have matching short options.