tl;dr view this gist

So its 2016, and we are still making console apps/cli's. In fact I would say there has been a surge in popularity of these types of tools. I think we have come to the realization that buttons on forms are not automatable, and that the command line doesn't have to be scary.

I recently started writing an app in dotnet core, which is the new runtime for dotnet. In the past I have often used command line parser, but as of this writing it does not support core.

I was really lost trying to find an arguments parsing library when I realized the dotnet cli was open sourced.

After much struggle, failing to bingle. I started ripping through the Entity Framework, and dotnet cli's code hoping to find a gem. Thats when I stumbled across a diamond. You see many dotnet projects use Microsft.Extension.CommandLineUtils to do cli parsing.