Mastering Linux Shell Scripting - Second Edition

Pythonic arguments

We should know by now that we will want to pass command-line arguments to Python and we can do this using the argv array. However, we are more like bash; with Python we combine the program name into the array with the other arguments.

Python also uses lowercase instead of uppercase in the object name:

• The argv array is a part of the sys object
• sys.argv[0] is the script name
• sys.argv[1] is the first argument supplied to the script
• sys.argv[2] is the second supplied argument and so on
• The argument count will always be at least 1, so, keep this in mind when checking for supplied arguments