[python] sys.argv[1], IndexError: list index out of range

I am having an issue with the following section of Python code:

# Open/Create the output file
with open(sys.argv[1] + '/Concatenated.csv', 'w+') as outfile:

    try:
        with open(sys.argv[1] + '/MatrixHeader.csv') as headerfile:
            for line in headerfile:
                outfile.write(line + '\n')
    except:
        print 'No Header File'

Specifically the error is as follows:

Traceback (most recent call last): File "ConcatenateFiles.py", line 12, in <module> with open(sys.argv[1] + 'Concatenated.csv', 'w+') as outfile:
IndexError: list index out of range

I've done some research and it seems that the sys.argv might require an argument at the command line when running the script, but I'm not sure what to add or what the issue might be! I've also searched the site, but all of the solutions I've found either have no comments and/or don't include the open function as mine does.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

This question is related to python

The answer is


sys.argv is the list of command line arguments passed to a Python script, where sys.argv[0] is the script name itself.

It is erroring out because you are not passing any commandline argument, and thus sys.argv has length 1 and so sys.argv[1] is out of bounds.

To "fix", just make sure to pass a commandline argument when you run the script, e.g.

python ConcatenateFiles.py /the/path/to/the/directory

However, you likely wanted to use some default directory so it will still work when you don't pass in a directory:

cur_dir = sys.argv[1] if len(sys.argv) > 1 else '.'

with open(cur_dir + '/Concatenated.csv', 'w+') as outfile:

    try:
        with open(cur_dir + '/MatrixHeader.csv') as headerfile:
            for line in headerfile:
                outfile.write(line + '\n')
    except:
        print 'No Header File'

I've done some research and it seems that the sys.argv might require an argument at the command line when running the script

Not might, but definitely requires. That's the whole point of sys.argv, it contains the command line arguments. Like any python array, accesing non-existent element raises IndexError.

Although the code uses try/except to trap some errors, the offending statement occurs in the first line.

So the script needs a directory name, and you can test if there is one by looking at len(sys.argv) and comparing to 1+number_of_requirements. The argv always contains the script name plus any user supplied parameters, usually space delimited but the user can override the space-split through quoting. If the user does not supply the argument, your choices are supplying a default, prompting the user, or printing an exit error message.

To print an error and exit when the argument is missing, add this line before the first use of sys.argv:

if len(sys.argv)<2:
    print "Fatal: You forgot to include the directory name on the command line."
    print "Usage:  python %s <directoryname>" % sys.argv[0]
    sys.exit(1)

sys.argv[0] always contains the script name, and user inputs are placed in subsequent slots 1, 2, ...

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