[Python-ideas] making a module callable

[Chris Angelico]

On Tue, Nov 26, 2013 at 10:43 AM, Greg Ewing
<greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
> Ben Finney wrote:
>>
>> Automatically discarding the first argument, on the assumption that the
>> program doesn't care about it, is making a false assumption in many
>> cases and makes a common use case needlessly difficult.
>
>
> If you're talking about doing different things based on
> argv[0], I wouldn't call it a *common* use case. The last
> time I saw it done was on an early version of SunOS that
> didn't have shared libraries, so they linked all the gui
> tools into one big executable to reduce disk and memory
> usage.

Upstart has a set of symlinks to initctl called "start", "stop",
"reload", etc. They're shortcuts for "initctl start", "initctl stop",
etc. Also, I've often fetched up argv[0] as part of a usage message,
which isn't strictly "doing different things", but it does mean that
renaming the program won't leave an old name inside its help message.

ChrisA