all command line options are described in using-on-general argument passing when known to the interpreterthe script name and additional arguments thereafter are turned into list of strings and assigned to the argv variable in the sys module you can access this list by executing import sys the length of the list is at least onewhen no script and no arguments are givensys argv[ is an empty string when the script name is given as '-(meaning standard input)sys argv[ is set to '-when - command is usedsys argv[ is set to '-cwhen - module is usedsys argv[ is set to the full name of the located module options found after - command or - module are not consumed by the python interpreter' option processing but left in sys argv for the command or module to handle interactive mode when commands are read from ttythe interpreter is said to be in interactive mode in this mode it prompts for the next command with the primary promptusually three greater-than signs ()for continuation lines it prompts with the secondary promptby default three dots the interpreter prints welcome message stating its version number and copyright notice before printing the first promptpython python (defaultsep : : [gcc on linux type "help""copyright""creditsor "licensefor more information continuation lines are needed when entering multi-line construct as an exampletake look at this if statementthe_world_is_flat true if the_world_is_flatprint("be careful not to fall off!"be careful not to fall offfor more on interactive modesee interactive mode the interpreter and its environment source code encoding by defaultpython source files are treated as encoded in utf- in that encodingcharacters of most languages in the world can be used simultaneously in string literalsidentifiers and comments -although the standard library only uses ascii characters for identifiersa convention that any portable code should follow to display all these characters properlyyour editor must recognize that the file is utf- and it must use font that supports all the characters in the file to declare an encoding other than the default onea special comment line should be added as the first line of the file the syntax is as follows-*codingencoding -*where encoding is one of the valid codecs supported by python using the python interpreter