I'm looking for a good cross platform cli parser for a little project I'm working on. It absolutely has to work in C++ (using C++11 for the project), and at least support linux and windows (via mingw and potentially msvc, if I can't get the code to properly work in mingw, since I'm using std::thread, it may not work in mingw.. we'll see).

append: Boost is a last resort.

It's just for parsing command line arguments/options. writing it in a scripting language would be, odd to say the least. And I suppose I could write a full parser for it, but thats a bit overkill. I can whip something up with some basic string parsing, but I'd prefer to use something that's already proven.

Yes, I could. But there are a few features that I'd like to have, that are less than trivial to support. Why code my own flexible option parser when one already exists?

It's also incredibly tedious and reinventing the wheel for no good reason.

Yes, getopt is what you're looking for. Whether or not it's ported to MinGW or not, I don't know, but I don't see why not. It's not doing anything exceptional. The Wikipedia article that ML linked to seems to have a link to a Windows port for Visual C++ even (not necessarily GNU-compatible, but good enough, I imagine).

For the n00bs among us, I'm sure what TF is looking for is things like: -gnu to be the same as -g -n -u, and for -- -gnu to be received as no options and "-gnu" literally in argv. These are conventions that a UNIX user becomes accustomed to, and rightly so. Windows is so weak in this regard. I've rolled my own a few times, but it's still a lot of work to support all of these features gracefully (particularly in a low-level language like C or C++), and it's so much easier using getopt.

Protip: In Perl, there's Getopt::Long.