turtleart script patches There is a really stupid bug with gst which is an import somewhere under from TurtleArt.tawindow import TurtleArtWindow: Even when it is not the top level program, but only an import, it examines sys.argv an issues a helpmessage if it finds --help or -h. I am issueing a bug report. That is crazy behavior. Meanwhile, I made a kludgy fix, importing sys earlier in the script and making a module variable argv before truncating sys.argv to length 1, eliminating any -h or --help, before the execution of the offending import line. - - - - - - With that fixed, I still had issues with the command line parsing. There is only one possible argument, a starting project file. It made no sense to me to put it in different places depending on whether the short or long form were used, -t or --taproject. In fact, since it is the only possible argument, why have -t or --taproject at all. My version allows only options h or o or their long versions. If there is an argument at all, it is the input project. The HELP_MSG was changed to match. I also flag too many parameters. - - - - By the way, the origial code with the check for --taproject works in this case, but to be analogous wih the inclusion tests in tuples as in if o in ('-h', '--help'): you should not have elif o in ('--ta_project'): which is a substring check for a string ('--ta_project'), not a tuple. In general to avoid the subsring test, you should have a trailing tuple comma: elif o in ('--ta_project', ): The patched file attachment is called turtleartCmdLine.py