How to Handle Command Line Arguments in Python

Not every application has to have a GUI; many powerful applications are purely command-line-based. In order to build powerful applications, one must harness the power of Python command line arguments. 

Handling command line arguments in your application will make it more flexible. Instead of hard-coding values into your script, you can parse the arguments sent to the application to dynamically change how the code executes.

Using sys.argv to handle Python command line arguments

The first method of parsing command line arguments in Python we will be exploring uses of the sys module. The sys module provides functions and variables that can manipulate parts of the Python runtime environment. It stores the command line arguments to a script in the variable argv as a list of strings.

Here is a straightforward example. This is our python script that is stored as main.py:

import sys

print ("The name of this script is %s" % (sys.argv[0]))

And we would run this Python script with the following command:

python main.py

which will print out:

The name of this script is main.py

The command line arguments to this script are stored as a list of strings. We can access the first argument with an index of 0, which is the file name of the script itself.

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