The option processing Greg proposed in his design doc matches that of CVS: there are a bunch of global options, and then each command has its own options. The big difference is that cvs commands take arguments as well (the list of files to operate on), whereas Greg's proposal is to allow multiple commands, each of which has private options. I don't see anywhere in Greg's proposal a requirement that commands take arguments as well as options, so there's no reason not to use the getopt module. The only aspect of it is remotely interesting is switching in different sets of options for each different command class, and that's pretty trivial. Here's a little demo code. It accepts anything as a command, and just keeps the same options for each, but the comments should make it more than clear what needs to be done where to get the expected behaviour. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ """Example of the command line syntax used by distutils, using getopt.""" import getopt import sys LONGOPTS = ["help", "verbose"] SHORTOPTS = "hv" def main(): args = ["<global>"] + sys.argv[1:] while args: cmd = args[0] # switch in different SHORTOPTS and LONGOPTS in this call to # support different options for different commands: cmdinfo = sys.modules[__name__] # cmdinfo = load_command(cmd) opts, args = getopt.getopt(args[1:], cmdinfo.SHORTOPTS, cmdinfo.LONGOPTS) # do something with the command here: print cmd, opts # create_command(opts).run() if __name__ == "__main__": main() ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -Fred -- Fred L. Drake, Jr. <fdrake@acm.org> Corporation for National Research Initiatives 1895 Preston White Dr. Reston, VA 20191