Hi there, a while ago I was asking some questions about the short option feature. If I'm not mistaken a short option can only be one letter long. Is that correct to say? In my project I need more than this. So I started to just add the short names to the options list like I would do for all options. But in this case they would share the same variable. Like this: po::options_description settings( "" ); settings.add_options() ( "input_1" , po::value< string >( &_input ) ->default_value( "" ) , "" ) ( "i1" , po::value< string >( &_input ) ->default_value( "" ) , "" ); Both options are pointing to the same variable. For some reasons this code works only for "input_1" and not for "i1". Why is that? If I use --i1="Hallo" the _input is empty. Regards, Christian