Question

I want the help option act the same as --help.

sidenote: I have created a program with the same command line behavior as svn or hg. I managed to do this with subparsers. However I want to make things consistent. That’s why I want help to work.

Answer 1

You can do the following to create an alias and make program help act the same as program --help

import argparse

def help(args):
    args.parser.print_help()

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description='my program')
subparsers = parser.add_subparsers()
p_help = subparsers.add_parser('help')
p_help.set_defaults(func=help, parser=parser)

args = parser.parse_args()
args.func(args)