On Jan 27, 12:02 pm, Pat <p...@junk.net> wrote: > Up until today, I never needed to pass any arguments to a Python program. > > I did all the requisite reading and found that I should use optparse > instead of getopt. I read the documentation and since the words > "simple" and "easy" often appeared in the examples and documentation, I > just knew that it would be a snap to implement. > > Problem is that all I wanted to do was pass a one flag to the program > "-d", for to enable debug mode. Several hours later I gave up after > optparse complained about every variation I tried. > > What does it take to pass single parameter to a program?
I'm assuming that question 2 starts here. To help answer question 1 without just writing the code for you, it might help if you (a) showed what you regard as your best effort (b) explained what part of http://docs.python.org/library/optparse.html#handling-boolean-flag-options you had trouble with. > http://docs.python.org/library/optparse.htmlstated that programs always > have options. Does it? > Is that so? What about "dir /s"? That has one option, /s. And this must be question 3: > > getopt resolved my immediate need, but I would like to know how one > could use optparse to extract out the options from something like "dir > /s /b". If you mean with "/" as the option designator instead of "-": there doesn't appear to be a documented way of doing it. You would have to do some social engineering on the users to get them used to doing "dir -s -b". In any case I thought the number of Windows users who know how to fire up a Command Prompt window was diminishingly small ... you actually have users who know how to use commands like "dir /s /b"? Cheers, John -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list