Hello, I am writing an application that moves some data through a sequence of possibly optional processing steps, for instance (simplified) 1/ Read and Export Data, optionally exporting it to a text or binary file. 2/ Optionally Normalise the data, optionally exporting to file. 3/ Optionally reduce the size of the data set, optionally exporting the result. 4/ Create a score for the data set, and write the score to a file or socket. Each processing step 1-4 has a set of options, for example step 1 might export the data as a text file or as a binary, and might transpose the data (rows and columns) to make it easier to plot in a spreadsheet. Data output at each processing step 1-3 is optional, and processing steps 1-2 are optional. As described, this sounds like a pipeline of processes, but the customers expectations (and my ability) suggest that this should be a single application*, but with a consequently complicated set of options. I'd like to be able to use program_options to help me parse the command line or config file, and so my plan for the command line is that it would support 4 options (one for each step), for instance with <required options> and [optional options]: app <--export [optional file name [binary|text [transpose]]> [--normalize [optional file name]] [--reduce [optional file name]] <--score <file name or server address> [optional treshold number]> <input file name> I want to allow each option to be given more than once, so that for instance data could be exported as text and binary with app --export file1.bin binary --export file2.txt text transposed ... In another case the command line might be simply app --export --normalize --score file://score.txt input.bin where --export and --normalize are given as boolean switches, and --score has used a default value for the threshold number. In another case, I would like all of the options in a configuration file, and only the input file name would be given on the command line. So my questions: 1/ Could I make my command line simpler? 2/ Will boost::program_options be helpful in this case - I've only used it once before in a much simpler scenario? 3/ What program_options methods should I be looking at? Although the documentation has an excellent set of examples, I'm finding the reference section something of a maze. All sugestions will be gratefully received! Steven * The data set is large, and some processing steps might transform the data in-place. Other steps might depend on the output of more than one steps (for instance step 4 might depend on the results of steps 2 and 3). I hope to make much of the process multi-threaded.