Question

I have a utility that is written in Python and is meant to be used on its own or in conjunction with other shell utilities. As such, my utility exits with status codes (e.g. 0 if everything is fine, 1 when an input file or output directory doesn’t exist, etc.).

My question: I’m using argparse module and it works great, not only for parsing options but for generating help. However, I’d like to be able to add some info about my exit statuses to the help as well. Is this possible with argparse; am I missing something?

Answer 1

That’s an info I’d put inside the epilog.

Adjusting the example from the official documentation:

>>> import argparse
>>> parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(
...     description='This is my utility description.',
...     epilog='The exit status will be 0 if everything is fine, '
...            'and 1 if an input-file or an output-directory does not exist')
>>> 
>>> parser.print_help()
usage: [-h]

This is my utility description.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help  show this help message and exit

The exit status will be 0 if everything is fine, and 1 when an input-file or
an output-directory does not exist