Get command line arguments as string

Question

I want to print all command line arguments as a single string. Example of how I call my script and what I expect to be printed:

./RunT.py mytst.tst -c qwerty.c

mytst.tst -c qwerty.c

The code that does that:

args = str(sys.argv[1:])
args = args.replace("[","")
args = args.replace("]","")
args = args.replace(",","")
args = args.replace("'","")
print args

I did all replaces because sys.argv[1:] returns this:

['mytst.tst', '-c', 'qwerty.c']

Is there a better way to get same result? I don't like those multiple replace calls

Answer 1

An option:

import sys
' '.join(sys.argv[1:])

The join() function joins its arguments by whatever string you call it on. So ' '.join(...) joins the arguments with single spaces (' ') between them.

Answer 2

None of the previous answers properly escape all possible arguments, like empty args or those containing quotes. The closest you can get with minimal code is to use shlex.quote (available since Python 3.3):

import shlex
cmdline = " ".join(map(shlex.quote, sys.argv[1:]))

EDIT

Here is a Python 2+3 compatible solution:

import sys

try:
    from shlex import quote as cmd_quote
except ImportError:
    from pipes import quote as cmd_quote

cmdline = " ".join(map(cmd_quote, sys.argv[1:]))