optparse question

[Thorsten Kampe]

* Pat (Mon, 26 Jan 2009 20:02:59 -0500)
> Up until today, I never needed to pass any arguments to a Python
> program.
> [...]
> getopt resolved my immediate need, but I would like to know how one 
> could use optparse to extract out the options from something like "dir 
> /s /b".

If you actually read the documentation (it's right at the top) you knew 
that this is not possible:
"There are many different syntaxes for options; the traditional Unix 
syntax is a hyphen (“-“) followed by a single letter [...] The GNU 
project introduced "--" [...] These are the only two option syntaxes 
provided by optparse.
Some other option syntaxes that the world has seen include:
[...]
a slash followed by a letter, or a few letters, or a word, e.g. "/f", 
"/file"

These option syntaxes are not supported by optparse, and they never will 
be. This is deliberate: [...] the last only makes sense if you’re 
exclusively targeting VMS, MS-DOS, and/or Windows."

Thorsten