Why stunt the capabilities of getopt by shoehorning in other kinds of information in its switch strings?

Because I never use the long option names and this lets me have it all in 1 place, so it's almost impossible to forget to document the option. As I said previously, not perfect, but convenient.

Update: I'm going to stop posting when my caffeine level is low. Your solutions does keep it all in once place, without imposing limitations on the descriptions as I had to. I'll probably start using your method for future work. You should post yours as a snippet.

Your solution also illustrates something I've heard elsewhere and found invaluable: "complicated data structures are better than complicated code". Or maybe it was "better data structures make better code". Whatever it was, your example has more of it than mine.

--Bob Niederman, http://bob-n.com