On 08 September 1999, Jim Fulton said:
While we're talking about Python command-line features, I have a couple of requests that would make life alot easier for us.
1. I'd like the options given before the script name to be accessable to Python scripts. For example, in:
python -O foo.py bar spam
I'd like to have a sys variable that told me that the arguments ['-O'] were included before the arguments ['foo.py', 'bar', 'spam'] (aka sys.argv). This is needed if I want to fork/exec (or span or whatever) Python with the same option.
Regarding -O, it would also be nice to have a higher-level way to find out what optimization level the current interpreter is running under. Currently, as I understand it, there's no way to predict whether py_compile will generate .pyc or .pyo files, which is a minor annoyance in the Distutils installation code. However, if Jim's mythical sys variable is guaranteed to canonicalize Python's command-line options so that something like "-O" in sys.python_argv would always answer this question, I'd be satisfied. Greg -- Greg Ward - software developer gward@cnri.reston.va.us Corporation for National Research Initiatives 1895 Preston White Drive voice: +1-703-620-8990 Reston, Virginia, USA 20191-5434 fax: +1-703-620-0913