what is a commandline argument?

Question

I am a newcomer to python (also very sorry if this is a newb question but) i have no idea what a command line argument is. when sys.argv is called, what exactly are the arguments? Any help with understanding this would be a great service.

Answer 1

Try running this program:

import sys
print(sys.argv)

You should see results similar to this:

% test.py
['/home/unutbu/pybin/test.py']
% test.py foo
['/home/unutbu/pybin/test.py', 'foo']
% test.py foo bar
['/home/unutbu/pybin/test.py', 'foo', 'bar']
% python test.py foo
['test.py', 'foo']

So, you see sys.argv is a list. The first item is the path to (or filename of) the script being run, followed by command-line arguments.