Permit argparse global flags after subcommand

Question

I am using argparse to build a command with subcommands:

mycommand [GLOBAL FLAGS] subcommand [FLAGS]

I would like the global flags to work whether they are befor

Answer 1

I see two issues in your example:

1) The use of '--disable' in both the parser and subparsers. Nested ArgumentParser deals with that overlapping dest.

2) The repeated set of arguments in the subparsers. parents is certainly one way to simplify that. But you could easily write your own code:

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
subparsers = parser.add_subparsers(dest='subparser_name')

parser.add_argument('--disable', dest='main_disable')    # This flag...

for name in ['compile', 'launch']:
    sp = subparsers.add_parser(name)
    sp.add_argument('zones', nargs='*')
    sp.add_argument('--disable', dest=name+'_disable')        # Is repeated...