Python magical main() signature like Perl 6

Question

Does python have any way to easily and quickly make CLI utilities without lots of argument parsing boilerplate?

In Perl 6, the signature for the MAIN sub automagically parses command line arguments.

Is there any way to do something similar in Python without lots of boilerplate? If there is not, what would be the best way to do it? I'm thinking a function decorator that will perform some introspection and do the right thing. If there's nothing already like it, I'm thinking something like what I have below. Is this a good idea?

@MagicMain
def main(one, two=None, *args, **kwargs):
    print one # Either --one or first non-dash argument
    print two # Optional --arg with default value (None)
    print args # Any other non-dash arguments
    print kwargs # Any other --arguments

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main(sys.argv)

Answer 1

The Baker library contains some convenient decorators to "automagically" create arg parsers from method signatures.

For example:

@baker.command
def test(start, end=None, sortby="time"):
  print "start=", start, "end=", end, "sort=", sortby

$ script.py --sortby name 1
start= 1 end= sortby= name

Answer 2

I'm not really sure what you consider to be parsing boilerplate. The 'current' approach is to use the argparse system for python. The older system is getopt.

Answer 3

Simon Willison's optfunc module tries to provide the functionality you're looking for.

Answer 4

The opterator module handles this.

https://github.com/buchuki/opterator

Answer 5

Python has the getopts module for doing this.

Answer 6

Recently I came across the begins project for decorating and simplifying command line handling.

It seems to offer a lot of the same functions you are looking for.