getopt or optparse options/arguments wrapping?

[Steven Bethard]

Rocky Zhou wrote:
> .dirs .files is just a snapshot of the current directories, which can
> be used to delete-outdated files when restoring. Here I used absolute
> path by using tar's -P parameter. When fs_rstore, it will do this:
> command = "tar -xpz -P -f %s.tgz -T %s" % (archive, self.t_files)
> 
> maybe I want add some parameters of tar, for example, --strip-path=X,
> so I hope the fs_rstore can do this:
> sh# fs_rstore pages --strip-path=X
> rather than:
> sh# fs_rstore pages -w '--strip-path=X'
> 
> What should I do?

One possibility using argparse (http://argparse.python-hosting.com/) 
would be to require the '--' pseudo-argument before all tar options. 
Then you could do something like::

     fs_rstore pages -- --strip-path=X --same-owner

That '--' pseudo-argument makes everything else after it into a 
positional argument (even if they start with '-' or '--'), so you can 
then just collect those positional arguments and add them to your 
"command".   Here's what that code might look like::

     >>> parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(prog='fs_backup')
     >>> parser.add_argument('-a', '--append', metavar='[t/x[L]:]PATH')
     >>> parser.add_argument('-d', '--delete', metavar='PATH')
     >>> parser.add_argument('-t', '--type',
     ...                     choices=['full', 'diff', 'incr'])
     >>> parser.add_argument('identity')
     >>> parser.add_argument('tar_options', nargs='*')
     >>> parser.parse_args('-a foo pages -- --strip-path=X')
     >>> args = parser.parse_args(
     ...     '-a foo pages -- --strip-path=X --same-owner'.split())
     >>> args.append
     'foo'
     >>> args.identity
     'pages'
     >>> args.tar_options
     ['--strip-path=X', '--same-owner']
     >>> "tar %s -f %s.tgz" % (' '.join(args.tar_options), args.identity)
     'tar --strip-path=X --same-owner -f pages.tgz'

Note that all the tar options got collected in 'args.tar_options'.

You could get rid of the need for '--' by adding each tar options to 
your parser with an add_argument() call, but I suspect that's too 
tedious. I've added a feature request to argparse to make this kind of 
thing easier::
     http://argparse.python-hosting.com/ticket/28
Not sure when I'll have a chance to look into this though.

STeVe

P.S. You should be able to get similar behavior out of optparse, though 
you'll have to parse the 'args' list yourself.