Pass an asterisk as part of a string in a command line argument into a python program?

Question

I have a script that (in turn) calls a command line program. It would vastly simplify my life if there was a way that it could accept a command of the form

psfcheck.py -n file*.img

in a way such that within the program I could then use the term "file*.img" as a string, since there are a few times I want to pass such a string through other command line programs which need to be run on the batch of files as a group (not individually, one at a time).

Is this possible? It feels like a n00bish question, but I've been pythoning for a while and have never stumbled across this.

Answer 1

Put quotes around the argument:

psfcheck.py -n "file*.img"

That will prevent the shell from expanding the pattern into the list of matching files.

Answer 2

The shell will expand any wildcards that it finds. You can prevent this by putting them inside quotes to hide them from the shell:

psfcheck.py -n "file*.img"