Installation

Type the following command:
$ sudo apt-get install python-argparse
Sample outputs:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
  libavutil-extra-51 libggiwmh0-target-x libggi2 libgii1 libvo-aacenc0
  libgii1-target-x mplayer-skin-blue libggiwmh0 libggi-target-x
  libvo-amrwbenc0
Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them.
Suggested packages:
  python-argparse-doc
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  python-argparse
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 4 not upgraded.
Need to get 42.9 kB of archives.
After this operation, 307 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 http://mirror.anl.gov/debian/ squeeze/main python-argparse all 1.1-1 [42.9 kB]
Fetched 42.9 kB in 1s (25.9 kB/s)          
Selecting previously deselected package python-argparse.
(Reading database ... 333589 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking python-argparse (from .../python-argparse_1.1-1_all.deb) ...
Setting up python-argparse (1.1-1) ...
Processing triggers for python-support ...

Example

From the “Python Command Line Arguments Examples” page::

<pre lang="python">
#!/usr/bin/python
import argparse
__author__ = 'nixCraft'
 
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description='This is a demo script by nixCraft.')
parser.add_argument('-i','--input', help='Input file name',required=True)
parser.add_argument('-o','--output',help='Output file name', required=True)
args = parser.parse_args()
 
## show values ##
print ("Input file: %s" % args.input )
print ("Output file: %s" % args.output )