How to prompt for user input and read command-line arguments

Question

How do I have a Python script that a) can accept user input and how do I make it b) read in arguments if run from the command line?

Answer 1

To read user input you can try the cmd module for easily creating a mini-command line interpreter (with help texts and autocompletion) and raw_input (input for Python 3+) for reading a line of text from the user.

text = raw_input("prompt")  # Python 2
text = input("prompt")  # Python 3

Command-line inputs are in sys.argv. Try this in your script:

import sys
print (sys.argv)

There are two modules for parsing command-line options: (deprecated since Python 2.7, use argparse instead) and get opt. If you just want to input files to your script, behold the power of file input