David Doria wrote:

I want to do something like this: --NumLists 2 --List0 a.txt b.txt --List1 c.txt d.txt

vector Lists(2);

po::options_description desc("Allowed options"); desc.add_options() ("help", "produce help message") ("List0", po::value(&Lists[0])->multitoken(), "List0.") ("List1", po::value(&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