Command Line Interfaces in Python (Overview)

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