Volodya, thanks for the help thus far, I think I am close to getting it to work.  According to the post you referred me to, multiple of the same parameter are not collapsed, ie
--list a.txt b.txt --list c.txt d.txt
Should give me access to the two separate lists.

I tried declaring the parameter as usual:
("list", po::value<vector<string> >()->multitoken(), "Lists.")

And then I thought it may be the .count property?

cout << "There are " << vm.count("list") << " lists." << endl;

But there is only 1 list.

The idea was to do this:

vector<vector<string> > lists;
    for(unsigned int list = 0; list < vm.count("list"); list++)
    {
        vector<string> l = vm["list"].as<vector<string> >();
        lists.push_back(l);
       
        for(unsigned int item = 0; item < lists[list].size(); item++)
            cout << "List: " << list << " Item: " << item << " " << lists[list][item] << endl;
    }

Clearly I am still missing the part about accessing the separated "list" params.  Can you see the problem here?

Thanks,

David

David Doria wrote:

> I want to do something like this:
> --NumLists 2 --List0 a.txt b.txt --List1 c.txt d.txt
>
>     vector<vector<string> > Lists(2);
>
>     po::options_description desc("Allowed options");
>     desc.add_options()
>             ("help", "produce help message")
>             ("List0", po::value<vector<string> >(&Lists[0])->multitoken(),
> "List0.")
>             ("List1", po::value<vector<string> >(&Lists[1])->multitoken(),
> "List1.")
>             ;
>
> But if I wanted to handle --NumLists 10, I would have to manually add List0,
> List1, ... List10 as parameters. That seems a bit silly, but maybe this is a
> very odd usage?

Well, it's somewhat odd :-)

> Please let me know if you can think of a better way to
> handle this.

Well, as a remark, your command line interface will make users cry:

- Do you really want users to type uppercase letters? (Use can use
 case-insensitive mode, of course, and allow any spelling, but upper
 case in your example seems strange.
- Do you really want users to count lists and pass 0, 1, 2, etc explicitly?
- Why do you need explicit specification of the number of lists?

I'd use:

       --list a.txt b.txt --list c.txt d.txt

You might find the recent thread useful for handling such command lines:

       http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lib.boost.user/46405

- Volodya