Brand new to programming, diving into it with python and "Learning Python the Hard Way."
For some reason I can not get shutil.copy to copy a file. On my desktop I currently have a file "test1.txt" and another "test2.txt". I want to copy whats in test1 into test2.
In another discussion about how to copy files in the fewest lines possible I found this code:
import shutil, sys
shutil.copy(sys.argv[a], sys.argv[b]) # <- I plug in test1 and test2
I get the error - NameError: name 'test1' is not defined
However, no variation of putting test1 and test2 into a and b runs successfully. I've tried test, test1.txt, setting the test1 variable and then plugging it in, nothing.
Answer
sys.argv returns a list. sys.argv[0] contains the name of the script, sys.argv[1] and sys.argv[2] contain the command line arguments:
import shutil, sys
print sys.argv # print out the list so you can see what it looks like
a = sys.argv[1]
b = sys.argv[2]
shutil.copy(a, b) # a & b take their values from the command line
shutil.copy('text1','text2') # here shutil is using hard coded names
Command line:
$ python filecopy.py t1.txt t2.txt
Output:
['filecopy.py', 't1.txt', 't2.txt']
And files t2.txt and text2 have been written. Note that sys.argv[0] might contain the full pathname rather than just the filename (this is OS dependent).