Command Line Interfaces in Python

Adding the capability of processing Python command line arguments provides a user-friendly interface to your text-based command line program. It’s similar to what a graphical user interface is for a visual application that’s manipulated by graphical elements or widgets.

Python exposes a mechanism to capture and extract your Python command line arguments. These values can be used to modify the behavior of a program. For example, if your program processes data read from a file, then you can pass the name of the file to your program, rather than hard-coding the value in your source code.

By the end of this course, you’ll know:

  • The origins of Python command line arguments
  • The underlying support for Python command line arguments
  • The standards guiding the design of a command line interface
  • The basics to manually customize and handle Python command line arguments
  • The libraries available in Python to ease the development of a complex command line interface

What’s Included:

Downloadable Resources:

About Liam Pulsifer

Liam is a software engineer and avid Pythonista. When he's not writing code to automate all of his daily tasks, you can often find him running, playing basketball and tennis, reading, or eating good food.

» More about Liam

Each tutorial at Real Python is created by a team of developers so that it meets our high quality standards. The team members who worked on this tutorial are:

Participant Comments

Avatar image for thomabr4

thomabr4 on June 17, 2021

Exactly what I was looking for. Awesome content!

← Browse All Courses