Creating Command Line Utilities with Python’s argparse
Introduction
Most of the user-facing software comes with a visually pleasing interface or via a decorated webpage. At other times, a program can be so small that it does not warrant an entire graphical user interface or web application to expose its functionality to the end-user.
In these cases, we can build programs that are accessible via a Command Line Interface, or CLI.
In this post, we will explore Python’s argparse module and use it to build a simple command-line tool to help us shorten URLs swiftly.
Command Line Interface
A Command Line Interface is a text-based user interface that provides a means of interacting with a computer through textual commands. The program that facilitates this interaction by exposing the interface is known as a command-line interpreter or a shell.
It takes in commands in the form of text input, executes programs based on the input provided, then displays the output on the interface. There are many shells available, with the first popular ones being the Bourne shell and C shell for Unix-based systems. The Bourne Again Shell (aka bash) is a hugely popular extension of the Bourne