Oct. 01, 2012

How to use sys.argv in Python

What is sys.argv?

sys.argv is a list in Python, which contains the command-line arguments passed to the script. 

With the len(sys.argv) function you can count the number of arguments. 

If you are gonna work with command line arguments, you probably want to 
use sys.argv. 

To use sys.argv, you will first have to import the sys module.

Example

To show how this works. 

(Remember that sys.argv[0] is the name of the script.

import sys
print "This is the name of the script: ", sys.argv[0]
print "Number of arguments: ", len(sys.argv)
print "The arguments are: " , str(sys.argv)

Output

This is the name of the script:  sysargv.py
Number of arguments in:  1
The arguments are:  ['sysargv.py']

If I run it again with additional arguments, I will get this output:

This is the name of the script:  sysargv.py
Number of arguments in:  3
The arguments are:  ['sysargv.py', 'arg1', 'arg2']

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