Elegant, but then it's no longer a basic shell-script as it requires python installed. If you can live with additional dependencies, then I like the node [1] c

Elegant, but then it's no longer a basic shell-script as it requires python installed. If you can live with additional dependencies, then I like the node [1] commander package, which is very readable and nice to work with in my opinion. #!/usr/bin/env node const { program } = require('commander'); program .command('clone <source> [destination]') .description('clone a repository') .action((source, destination) => { console.log('clone command called'); }); It also automatically generates the --help output for ./script -h [1] https://github.com/tj/commander.js/ https://github.com/tj/commander.js/