If you can pull in the command line in an unmolested format, can you not then parse it in a more sensible way than the startup code?

I don't think it would help much to have to use two different methods to get command line variable assignments.

If creating a bespoke argument parser is going to cause a lot of work or delay I guess that in the short term we could probably create a "command line parser" UDF to do the job - at least we could be sure of the accuracy of the data.