building-command-line-apps.md

Building command line apps

To build a command line application, you need to learn the following modules:

• sys
  • Module of the week -- specifically the Runtime environment
• argparse
  • Argparse tutorial
  • Module of the week
• fileinput
  • Module of the week

Questions

• The program alarm.py pops up a user-specified message after 2 minutes. The message can be any piece of text, and is displayed calling the (ficticious) function alert(). When the user types alarm.py Switch off your laptop, write a program that calls alert('Switch off your laptop', seconds=120).

• We want to allow the user to specify how many seconds later the alarm should be set. So, for example, if we type:

    alarm.py --seconds=30 Hello
  

  ... change the program to call alert('Hello', seconds=30). If --seconds is not specified, it sets --seconds to 120 seconds.

• The user may want the alarm to be specified at multiple times. So, if we type:

    alarm.py --seconds=10 --seconds=20 Hello
  

  ... change the program to call alert('Hello', seconds=10) followed by alert('Hello', seconds=20).