reading Unix wild card filenames from command line in Python

Question

What's the correct way to handle Unix style wildcard arguments using optparse in Python? I have:

myscript.py:

from optparse import OptionParser
parser = OptionParser()
parser.add_option("--input", dest="input", default=None, nargs=1)
parser.add_option("--outdir", dest="outdir", default=None, nargs=1)
(options, args) = parser.parse_args()

I want to be able to do:

myscript.py --input *.txt --outdir mydir/

I don't want to necessarily read the contents of all the files matching *.txt . I want myscript.py to access their filenames, because some scripts just pass on the filenames to other programs without needing to open/read the files. How can I get an iterator that returns the filenames, while still allowing other arguments like --outdir to be passed after the wildcard friendly option (in this case --input )? thanks.

Answer 1

Unix shells will expand *.txt into separate arguments before they are passed to your program; Windows' command interpreter will not.

Assuming you're using an environment where they aren't expanded first -- that is, invoking python prog.py '*.txt' , for instance, you can use glob.glob() to do the expansion yourself.