optparse question

[Pat]

Thorsten Kampe wrote:
> * 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

Sigh.  I used dir /s /b as a simple Windows command with a flag (it 
could have been dir /s) because it was the first thing that popped into 
my mind.

I had no idea people were going to get so upset that I used a Windows 
example and go off on a tear.