<p>I'm writing a shell for a project of mine, which by design parses commands that looks like this:</p>

<p>COMMAND_NAME ARG1="Long Value" ARG2=123 ARG3=me@me.com</p>

<p>My problem is that Python's command line parsing libraries (getopt and optparse) forces me to use '-' or '--' in front of the arguments. This behavior doesn't match my requirements.</p>

<p>Any ideas how can this be solved? Any existing library for this?</p>

Without fairly intensive surgery on optparse or getopt, I don't believe you can sensibly make them parse your format. You can easily parse your own format, though, or translate it into something optparse could handle:
```
```
parser = optparse.OptionParser()
parser.add_option("--ARG1", dest="arg1", help="....")
parser.add_option(...)
...
newargs = sys.argv[:1]
for idx, arg in enumerate(sys.argv[1:])
    parts = arg.split('=', 1)
    if len(parts) < 2:
        # End of options, don't translate the rest. 
        newargs.extend(sys.argv[idx+1:])
        break
    argname, argvalue = parts
    newargs.extend(["--%s" % argname, argvalue])

parser.parse_args(newargs)
```
```