jarro2783/cxxopts VS gflags

The most feature-rich C++ CLI library is CLI11. Other popular choices include Boost.ProgramOptions, argparse, cxxopts and others.

I've used cxxopts and can't complain. It's available on both Conan and vcpkg.

For streamlined command line option parsing check out a library like cxxopts or similar. There are plenty out there.

Have a look at cxxopts which is similar to the python getopt functions, It's header only so easy to use (just dump the header in your project). There is also boost::program_options but this requires boost which is big.

I use CLI11 for more complex things, https://github.com/jarro2783/cxxopts for simpler interfaces, and boost.program_options if I have to and have boost anyways as dependency.

Let the user pass the path/filename as an input argument to the program. Your main() function takes arguments from the console, so you could invoke your program as .\my_program --err_log "\path\to\my_errors.log". Of course this again only works if executed from the console - you can however create a desktop shortcut that invokes your program with this argument and you can also configure your IDE to pass this argument when running your program. To make parsing input arguments easier, use a library such as cxxopts

You probably want the header only library cxxopts.

To make parsing command line options easier I can recommend the cxxopts library.

I have previously used this: https://github.com/jarro2783/cxxopts

Someone opened an issue at https://github.com/gflags/gflags/issues/76, to request for a feature of flag alias, and it has been opened for about 7 years.

git clone https://github.com/gflags/gflags.git

Google's command line flags library, known to the public as absl::Flags and formerly gflags, does not distinguish between --foo and -foo, these are both the flag "foo". Each flag has a unique name so there is never a short -f equivalent to --foo, and -foo can never mean -f -o -o.

The main design motivation of absl::Flags is that the flag definitions can appear in any module, not just main. Go inherits this. A quirk that Go did not inherit is gflags --nofoo alternate form of --foo=false.

This is all documented at https://gflags.github.io/gflags/#commandline, which is pretty much a literal export of the flags package documentation that a Google engineer would see internally.