On Mon, 18 Mar 2013 16:17:27 -0500, Peng Yu wrote: > Hi, > > I don't quite understand how -m option is used. And it is difficult to > search for -m in google. Could anybody provide me with an example on how > to use this option? Thanks! > > -m module-name > Searches sys.path for the named module and runs the > corresponding .py file as a script.
You use it to run a python module or package as a script, without caring whether it is a .py file, a .pyc file, a package, compressed in a zip file, a module written in C inside a .dll or .so file, or caring exactly where it is. python -m module arguments is conceptually like: * launch Python * insert arguments into sys.argv * import module * run it as a script * exit So long as the module is *somewhere* on your PYTHONPATH, -m will find it and run it. Whether it does something useful or not will depend on the module. Here is one example of a module written to be callable as a script: [steve@ando ~]$ python -m timeit -s "x = [3, 5, 2, 8, 1, 9, 7]" "x.sort()" 1000000 loops, best of 3: 0.451 usec per loop Notice that I did not need to worry about where the timeit module actually lives on disk. All I needed to know is that it was somewhere in the standard library. -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
