Learn Linux Shell Scripting - Fundamentals of Bash 4.4

Combining flags with positional arguments

It is possible to combine positional arguments (in the way we've been using them before this chapter) with options and option arguments. There are some things to consider in this scenario:

• By default, Bash recognizes flags such as -f as positional parameters
• Just as there is an order to flags and flag arguments, there is an order for flags and positional parameters

When dealing with a mix of getopts and positional arguments, the flags and flag options should always be provided before the positional arguments! This is because we want to parse and handle all flags and flag arguments before we get to the positional parameters. This is a fairly typical scenario for both scripts and command-line tools, ...