I am trying to have my script be able to take in an arbitrary number of file names as command line arguments. In Unix, it is possible to use the '*' key to represent any character. For example,
ls blah*.txt
will list every file with blah at the beginning and txt at the end.
I need something like this for my python script.
python myscript.py blah*.txt
Is this possible? and if it is, how can it be done?
import sys
for arg in sys.argv[1:]:
print arg
In Unix-land, the shell does the job of glob-expanding the commandline arguments, so you don't need to do it yourself. If you're processing a bunch of files in sequence, you might also look at the fileinput module, which works like Perl's "magic ARGV" handle and the -n and -i flags. It lets you loop over every line of every file named on the commandline, optionally moving the file to a backup name and opening stdout to the original name of the file, which lets you do something simple like:
import fileinput
for line in fileinput.input(inplace = True, backup = '.bak'):
print fileinput.filelineno() + ": " + line
to add the line number to the beginning of every line of every file on the commandline, while saving the originals as filename.bak.
I think you want to use glob.
import sys, glob
files = reduce(lambda x, y: x + y, (glob.glob(x) for x in sys.argv[1:]))
sys.argv