Does Python have an argc argument?

In python a list knows its length, so you can just do len(sys.argv) to get the number of elements in argv.

You're better off looking at argparse for argument parsing.

http://docs.python.org/dev/library/argparse.html

Just makes it easy, no need to do the heavy lifting yourself.

I often use a quick-n-dirty trick to read a fixed number of arguments from the command-line:

[filename] = sys.argv[1:]

in_file = open(filename)   # Don't need the "r"

This will assign the one argument to filename and raise an exception if there isn't exactly one argument.