I'm writing a program with program_options (very cool and useful library, BTW) and I found myself wanting to print out the variable_map values for debugging purposes. Is there an easy way to do this? Also couple of documentation nits: 1) From the first example.... if (vm.count("help")) { std::cout << desc << "\n"; I had to read the code to figure out that variable_map inherits from std::map, and this is why you can call this. Documentation only says: class variables_map : : public boost::program_options::abstract_variables_map 2) In the 'Storage Component' section -- there's this: Let's consider an example: variables_map vm; store(parse_command_line(argc, argv, desc), vm); store(parse_config_file("example.cfg", desc), vm); finish(vm); .... Finally the call to notify function runs user-specified notify functions and stores values into regular variables, if needed. I assume 'finish' is supposed to be notify? I don't see any docs for finish. Jeff