Had a burst of hacking over the weekend, and one of the outcomes was the realisation that I have a few practises that could be usefully put into a template for new scripts.

So: here is my current starting point for any new script.

#!/usr/bin/python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

from optparse import OptionParser

def _test():
    import doctest
    doctest.testmod()

def _profile_main(filename):
    import cProfile, pstats
    prof = cProfile.Profile()
    ctx = """_main(filename)"""
    prof = prof.runctx(ctx, globals(), locals())
    stats = pstats.Stats(prof)
    stats.sort_stats("time")
    stats.print_stats(10)

def _blurt(s):
    pass

def _main(filename):
    pass

if __name__ == "__main__":
    usage = "usage: %prog [options]"
    parser = OptionParser(usage=usage)
    parser.add_option('--profile', '-P',
                       help    = "Print out profiling stats",
                       action  = 'store_true')
    parser.add_option('--test', '-t',
                       help   ='Run doctests',
                       action = 'store_true')
    parser.add_option('--verbose', '-v',
                       help   ='print debugging output',
                       action = 'store_true')

    (options, args) = parser.parse_args()
    
    # assign non-flag arguments here
    # filename = args[0]

    def really_blurt(s):
        print s

    if options.verbose:
        _blurt = really_blurt

    if options.profile:
        _profile_main(filename)
        exit()

    if options.test:
        _blurt = really_blurt
        _test()
        exit()

    _main()