When I need a new tool, I often code it in Python. Often, command-line options are useful. Sometimes it is possible to have a fixed set of parameters, but this is not very flexible. Fortunately, Python has standard libraries to handle parsing command lines. Three libraries provide varying capabilities. Some of the systems I run on have older versions like Jython 2.1 or Python 2.6. This limits which libraries I can use without backporting libraries
This document provides examples of four command-line processing options. The examples are for a program that processes files and has an optional argument to report the execution time.
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