Rust Version

rustc 1.19.0 (0ade33941 2017-07-17)

Affected Version of clap

clap 2.25.0

Expected Behavior Summary

It would be nice to be able to distinguish between -a A B C D E and -a A B -a C D E, where -a is an arg with min_values(2) and multiple(true).

From clap::Arg::min_values

NOTE: This does not implicitly set Arg::multiple(true). This is because -o val -o val is multiple occurrences but a single value and -o val1 val2 is a single occurence with multiple values.

This seems to imply that such a distinction is already possible. But the test option_min_exact demonstrates exactly the opposite behaviour.

A toy example of where this might be useful is a backup program. It might allow users to backup files to multiple "targets", for example, with common settings specified once. An invocation might look like:

backup -s server -u user -target target1 file1 file2 file3 -target target2 file4 file5 file6 file7 -target target3 file8

Currently there seems to be no way to determine that target1, target2, and target3 appeared immediately after -target. All we know is that there are three targets (occurrences_of("target")), but values_of("target") will just iterate over target1 file1 file2 file3 target2 file4 file5 file6 file7 target3 file8