Answer by martineau for How do you get the name of the program using argparse?

ArgumentParser instances have a prog attribute which I think is what you want.

import argparseparser = argparse.ArgumentParser()print('parser.prog: {}'.format(parser.prog))

I discovered this by reading the module's source code in Lib/argparse.py—specifically looking at the class ArgumentParserdefinition. Since the attribute's name doesn't start with an underscore character, I assume it's public.

Update

I see that, nowadays at least, that the prog attribute of ArgumentParser instance is (or has been since this question was asked) documented in both Python 2's documentation and Python 3's documentation.

So, yes, it's definitely public, and in both versions, if it is not supplied as a keyword argument when creating the ArgumentParser, it defaults to prog = _os.path.basename(_sys.argv[0]) (where _os and _sys are private argparse module attributes that correspond to their non-underscore-prefixed counterparts. Note that because of the use of os.basename(), this will only be the script's filename, not the complete path to it that may (it's OS dependent) have been in sys.argv[0].