For a language whose motto is "There should be one - and preferably only one - obvious way to do it", Python has at least four ways to handle command line arguments out-of-the-box:

* sys.argv

* argparse

* optparse

* getopt

There are, of course, additional third party modules (like opster) that also handle arguments.

sys.argv is part of the interpreter. The other three are abstractions over it.

optparse is deprecated (kept around for obvious backward-compat reasons)

getopt is just a different API for people who feel more comfortable with C's getopt API and don't want to learn something else

argparse is the CLI option parser for the future.

tl;dr: There is one way to parse command line arguments: sys.argv. But there are a few abstractions of doing that available in the stdlib.

Is getopt part of the C library? I think it only is POSIX, not C.