python crossplatform handling of wildcard command line arguments

Windows and Linux shells handle wildcard arguments differently. Linux (at least under bash) expands wildcard arguments before passing them to a program. Windows passes them without expanding them. This leads to trouble if you want to write a command line utility that will work correctly in both Linux and Windows (or even one compatible with wildcard arguments at all in Windows).
In Python, the typical way to expand a wildcard is with the glob module.
either: glob.glob to return a list, or glob.iglob to return an iterator (which may be preferable if a large list is expected).

Here's a solution that uses the argparse and glob modules:

import argparse  
from glob import glob  
   
def main(file_names):  
    print file_names  
   
if __name__ == "__main__":  
    parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()  
    parser.add_argument("file_names", nargs='*') 
    #nargs='*' tells it to combine all positional arguments into a single list  
    args = parser.parse_args()  
    file_names = list()  
   
    #go through all of the arguments and replace ones with wildcards with the expansion
    #if a string does not contain a wildcard, glob will return it as is.
    for arg in args.file_names:  
        file_names += glob(arg)  
     
    main(file_names)

One caveat is that I have noticed that python and bash don't sort the expanded lists in the same way, so if for some reason you need deterministic sorting of input, you should sort the resulting list yourself.


see also: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12501761/passing-multple-files-with-asterisk-to-python-shell-in-windows