Parsing a program's command line arguments has always been a distraction from the main programming task at hand. The argtable library simplifies the job by enabling the programmer to define the command line options directly in the source code as a static array of structs and then pass that array to argtable library functions which parse the command line accordingly. The values extracted from the comand line are deposited directly into user-defined program variables where they can be accessed by the main program. Argtable can also generate descriptions of the command line syntax from that same array for display as on-line help.