Paul. This is a bug, not a feature in argparse. Devin is 100% correct. According to the docs REMAINDER should be greedy and is used for passing arguments to sub commands. In your example the expected behavior is that if you do put "d --foo x a b c" that --foo is none and args gets everything. We shouldn't need to use a gatekeeper or resort to manually parsing the remainder arguments. It also shouldn't take 5 years to acknowledged that it needs to be fixed. I'm happy to make a patch if its a bandwidth issue. Am I misunderstanding and you feel like its not possible to fix? I guess if there is a backward compatibility issue then we need to write a new option that does literally return the remainder arguments as documented.