Passing arguments to a script

Passing arguments to a script is useful because a script can be used repeatedly without modification.

The arguments you pass on the command line are passed as values in the list sys.argv. You can use the len(sys.argv) command to obtain the number of values passed. For example:

import sys
print "test1"
print sys.argv[0]
print sys.argv[1]
print len(sys.argv)

In this example, the import command imports the entire sys class so that you can use the existing methods for this class, such as argv.

The script in this example can be invoked using the following line:

/u/mjloos/test1 mike don

The result is the following output:

/u/mjloos/test1 mike don
test1
mike
don
3