How to pass command line arguments to ipython

Question

Is there any way that I pass arguments to my python script through command line while using ipython? Ideally I want to call my script as:

ipython -i script.py --argument blah

and I want to be able to have --argument and blah listed in my sys.argv.

But I guess argparse also uses sys.argv to parse the arguments. — adrin
– adrin, Commented Mar 25, 2014 at 10:43

wjandrea · Accepted Answer · 2025-03-01 17:29:21Z

66

You can use one -- more option before that:

ipython  script.py -- --argument blah

Help of ipython:

ipython [subcommand] [options] [-c cmd | -m mod | file] [--] [arg] ...

If invoked with no options, it executes the file and exits, passing the
remaining arguments to the script, just as if you had specified the same
command with python. You may need to specify `--` before args to be passed
to the script, to prevent IPython from attempting to parse them. If you
specify the option `-i` before the filename, it will enter an interactive
IPython session after running the script, rather than exiting.

Demo:

$ cat script.py 
import sys
print(sys.argv)

$ ipython  script.py -- --argument blah
['script.py', '--argument', 'blah']

$ ipython  script.py -- arg1 arg2
['script.py', 'arg1', 'arg2']

edited Mar 1 at 17:29

wjandrea

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answered Mar 25, 2014 at 10:46

Omid Raha

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4 Comments

rjurney Over a year ago

And how do you do it without specifying the file to run?

Omid Raha Over a year ago

@rjurney, use ipython -i arg1 arg2

TankorSmash Over a year ago

Does -- have any semantic meaning on its own, ala | and > in terminals, or is this just convention?

Nathan Chappell Over a year ago

@TankorSmash just convention. If you look in argv you'll just see it listed as another argument. Note that git uses this extensively.

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