Hue, It looks like you may have options and arguments confused. Arguments are the pieces of information that your program needs to run. Options are used to tune the behaviour of your program.
For example: grep -i foo bar Tries to match the expression "foo" in the file "bar", ignoring the case of the letters. The grep program needs to know what expression to look for and where to look, so "foo" and "bar" are arguments. Ignoring the case of the letters is tuning the behaviour of the grep program - in this case making it less sensitive. The program will run without it. If your task is : python MyScriptName.py n t h i o Then n, t, h, i and o are arguments. You can get them from the args array: import sys print ",".join(sys.argv) would print "n, t, h, i, o" If you are using options, you must put dashes before them, and they must be before the arguments. So, if this was hue.py: import sys import string import getopt def usage(): print '''haarp_make.py -- uses getopt to recognize options Options: -n -- No -t -- Time -h -- help -i -- image_file -o -- Output:filename''' sys.exit(1) def main(): print "SYS ARGV: ", ",".join(sys.argv) try: opts,args = getopt.getopt(sys.argv[1:], 'n:t:h:i:o:', ["Number=","time=","help=","image_file=","Output Filename="]) except getopt.GetoptError: print 'Unrecognized argument or option' usage() sys.exit(0) print "OPTS: ", ",".join([repr(o) for o in opts]) print "ARGS: ", ",".join(args) if __name__ == "__main__": main() Then: C:\temp>python hue.py n t h i o SYS ARGV: hue.py,n,t,h,i,o OPTS: ARGS: n,t,h,i,o And: C:\temp>python hue.py -i image.py n t h o SYS ARGV: hue.py,-i,image.py,n,t,h,o OPTS: ('-i', 'image.py') ARGS: n,t,h,o Hope that hepls. Tom -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list