This summer there was some discussion on the boost-users list about whether it is possible to use program_options to write an interface like 'xargs' (or time, or env, or nohup, or ssh, or sudo, or valgrind, or Python, or lots of other tools) where any options (--foo) that appear after the first positional arguments are considered positional arguments. In other words,'xargs foo --help' in real Unix behaves the same as 'xargs -- foo --help', rather than 'xargs --help foo', but you can't get this behavior currently from Boost. I proposed a couple patches, and there was a very small amount of discussion, but it sort of petered out (in part because I went away for a couple weeks at an inopportune time). Is there any interest in adopting them? The bug I filed just got another hit from someone else who wants it. https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/ticket/6991 The following is a summary of the status: The ideal would be to have an 'allow_interspersed' style option which would be set by default (to give the now-usual behavior of "cmd arg --opt" being the same as "cmd --opt arg") but which a client program could unset if they wanted the xargs-like behavior. However, I don't see how to do this, because
If someone says style_t style = allow_short | allow_slash_for_short I can't automatically go and set allow_interspersed for them as well.
And so without some ugly and not-worth-it coding tricks (changing style_t to a class), unless I'm missing something you can't pick this ideal without breaking backwards compatibility. So I instead suggested a new 'disallow_interspersed' style option, which would be off by default (keeping backwards compatibility) but you could set it to get xargs-like behavior, but this is inconsistent with all the other style flags which are allow_xxx. So what do you want to do regarding this issue? References: Trac issue: https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/ticket/6991 (includes a patch for both of those options) The previous messages in this discussion, on boost-users: http://lists.boost.org/boost-users/2012/07/75100.php Evan