Bare asterisk in function arguments?

Question

What does a bare asterisk in the arguments of a function do?

When I looked at the pickle module, I see this:

pickle.dump(obj, file, protocol=None, *,         


        

Answer 1

def func(*, a, b):
    print(a)
    print(b)

func("gg") # TypeError: func() takes 0 positional arguments but 1 was given
func(a="gg") # TypeError: func() missing 1 required keyword-only argument: 'b'
func(a="aa", b="bb", c="cc") # TypeError: func() got an unexpected keyword argument 'c'
func(a="aa", b="bb", "cc") # SyntaxError: positional argument follows keyword argument
func(a="aa", b="bb") # aa, bb

the above example with **kwargs

def func(*, a, b, **kwargs):
    print(a)
    print(b)
    print(kwargs)

func(a="aa",b="bb", c="cc") # aa, bb, {'c': 'cc'}