Why are they parsing argv by hand instead of using, say, argp_parse()¹? It’s even the seventh commandment of The Ten Commandments for C Programmers²: “Thou sha

Why are they parsing argv by hand instead of using, say, argp_parse()¹? It’s even the seventh commandment of The Ten Commandments for C Programmers²: “Thou shalt study thy libraries and strive not to reinvent them without cause, that thy code may be short and readable and thy days pleasant and productive.” Also by Henry Spencer, from How to Steal Code³: “Even widely-available library functions often are not used nearly as much as they should be. A conspicuous example is getopt, for command-line argument parsing. Getopt supplies only quite modest help in parsing the command line, but the standardization and consistency that its use produces is still quite valuable; there are far too many pointless variations in command syntax in the hand-cooked argument parsers in most UNIX programs. Public-domain implementations of getopt have been available for years, and AT&T has published (!) the source for the System V implementation. Yet people continue to write their own argument parsers.” Now, of course, we have argp_parse(), which also comes included in glibc, and is much better than getopt(). 1. https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_mono/libc.html#Argp https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_mono/libc.html... 2. https://www.lysator.liu.se/c/ten-commandments.html https://www.lysator.liu.se/c/ten-commandments.html 3. https://archive.org/details/inventing-wheel-once https://archive.org/details/inventing-wheel-once