Command Line Arguments

Sys.Argv

import sys

# the first argument is the name of the file
args = sys.argv[1:]

GetOpts

http://www.tutorialspoint.com/python/python_command_line_arguments.htm

getopt.getopt(args, options, [long_options])

• args: This is the argument list to be parsed.

• options: This is the string of option letters that the script wants to recognize, with options that require an argument should be followed by a colon (:).

• long_options: This is optional parameter and if specified, must be a list of strings with the names of the long options, which should be supported. Long options, which require an argument should be followed by an equal sign ('='). To accept only long options, options should be an empty string.

• This method returns value consisting of two elements: the first is a list of (option, value) pairs. The second is the list of program arguments left after the option list was stripped.

• Each option-and-value pair returned has the option as its first element, prefixed with a hyphen for short options (e.g., '-x') or two hyphens for long options (e.g., '--long-option').

#!/usr/bin/python

import sys, getopt

def main(argv):
   inputfile = ''
   outputfile = ''
   try:
      opts, args = getopt.getopt(argv,"hi:o:",["ifile=","ofile="])
   except getopt.GetoptError:
      print 'test.py -i <inputfile> -o <outputfile>'
      sys.exit(2)
   for opt, arg in opts:
      if opt == '-h':
         print 'test.py -i <inputfile> -o <outputfile>'
         sys.exit()
      elif opt in ("-i", "--ifile"):
         inputfile = arg
      elif opt in ("-o", "--ofile"):
         outputfile = arg
   print 'Input file is "', inputfile
   print 'Output file is "', outputfile

if __name__ == "__main__":
   main(sys.argv[1:])