I dutifully followed the link from the --no-foo thread, and I have some comments. The Winmain Command Line section says split_command_line in the text, split_winmain in the example code. The Response Files section shows example code for parsing a response file using Tokenizer. Why shouldn't one be able to use split_command_line instead? There doesn't seem to be any difference between a command line in string format and a response file. Also, response file support doesn't seem proper. Response files should work like this: @file1 --option=value @file2 If file1 contains --option, it will be overriden by the command line. Similarly, all options in file2 will override both file1 and the command line --option=value. From a cursory look at the example, this doesn't seem to be the case, but I may be wrong. An additional parser could have been used to enable this behavior if it were possible to return more than one option/value pair from it. (This would also allow "option bundles" like -O1 expanding into a set of option/values.)