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.SH CAVEATS
.PP
Because of the way argument parsing is implemented under \s-1UNIX\s+1,
\s-1MS-DOS\s+1, and \s-1OS/2\s+1,
option arguments which contain a leading dash (`\-') (or whatever the
option prefix character is defined to be) may \fInot\fP be specified
as a separate argument on the command line, it must be part of the
same argument. That is to say that if a program has a \fB\-f\fP option
that requires a string argument, then the following:
.sp 4p
.RS
.ft 4
\-f\-arg
.ft R
.RE
.sp 4p
will properly assign the string ``\fB\-arg\fP'' to the option whereas
the following:
.sp 4p
.RS
.ft 4
\-f\0\-arg
.RE
.sp 4p
will be interpreted by \fIparseargs\fP as two option strings: the first
of which (``\fB\-f\fP'') is missing a required argument and the second of
which (``\fB\-arg\fP'') will most likely be flagged as an invalid option.
.PP
Similarly, if the user requires an \s-1\fIARGLIST\fP\s+1 option
to take multiple arguments with leading dashes then the following
method must be used: It is a ``feature'' of \fIparseargs\fP that
\s-1\fIARGLIST\fP\s+1 arguments are always appended to the current
list of arguments for the given option. Thus, if ``\fB\-f\fP'' is
an option taking a list of arguments, then the following are all
equivalent:
.sp 8p
.RS
.ft 4
\-farg1 arg2
.sp 4p
\-f arg1 arg2
.sp 4p
\-farg1 \-farg2
.sp 4p
\-f arg1 \-f arg2
.ft R
.RE
.sp 8p
Hence multiple ``leading dash'' arguments may specified as follows:
.sp 4p
.RS
.ft 4
\-f\-dash_arg1 \-f\-dash_arg2  ...
.ft R
.RE