Optik 1.1.1 =========== Optik is a powerful, flexible, extensible, easy-to-use command-line parsing library for Python. Using Optik, you can add intelligent, sophisticated handling of command-line options to your scripts with very little overhead. Here's an example of using Optik to add some command-line options to a simple script: from optik import OptionParser [...] parser = OptionParser() parser.add_option("-f", "--file", action="store", type="string", dest="filename", help="write report to FILE", metavar="FILE") parser.add_option("-q", "--quiet", action="store_false", dest="verbose", default=1, help="don't print status messages to stdout") (options, args) = parser.parse_args() With these few lines of code, users of your script can now do the "usual thing" on the command-line: <yourscript> -f outfile --quiet <yourscript> -qfoutfile <yourscript> --file=outfile -q <yourscript> --quiet --file outfile (All of these result in options.filename == "outfile" options.verbose == 0 ...just as you might expect.) Even niftier, users can run one of <yourscript> -h <yourscript> --help and Optik will print out a brief summary of your script's optons: usage: <yourscript> [options] options: -h, --help show this help message and exit -fFILE, --file=FILE write report to FILE -q, --quiet don't print status messages to stdout That's just a taste of the flexibility Optik gives you in parsing your command-line. See the documentation included in the package for details. AUTHOR, COPYRIGHT, AVAILABILITY ------------------------------- Optik was written by Greg Ward <gward@python.net> The latest version of Optik can be found at http://optik.sourceforge.net/ Copyright (c) 2001 Gregory P. Ward. All rights reserved. CHANGES IN OPTIK 1.1.1 ---------------------- * Various documentation tweaks (thanks to Alan Eldridge <alane@geeksrus.net> for prodding me into those, and for doing most of one). * Fixed a bug that prevented users from doing things like -f"" or --file="" on the command-line. Involved rewriting some hairy code in OptionParser, which has the pleasant side-effect that the first argument to an option with multiple arguments can now be jammed up against the option, eg. "-p3 5 1". -- Greg Ward - geek-at-large gward@python.net http://starship.python.net/~gward/ Very few profundities can be expressed in less than 80 characters.