Christopher Spears wrote:
>  I just completed an assignment out of Learning Python
>  in which I used the Cmd class from the cmd module to
>  create a little shell:
>  My main question concerns the naming of functions such
>  as:
>  
>  def do_ls(self, line):
>          if line == '': dirs = [os.curdir]
>          else: dirs = line.split()
>          for dirname in dirs:
>              print 'Listing of %s:' % dirname
>              print '\n'.join(os.listdir(dirname))
>  
>  Originally, I called the function 'ls', but when I did
>  that, the function didn't work when I typed 'ls' at
>  the prompt.  When I looked in the back of the book, I
>  saw the name the authors gave their function, which
>  was 'do_ls'.  When I changed the function's name to
>  do_ls, the function worked when I typed 'ls' at the
>  prompt.  Does anyone know why this happened?

Cmd uses introspection (using the built-in function getattr()) to find 
the handler methods. For a command named 'ls' it looks for a method 
'do_ls' to handle the command. You can also provide 'help_ls' to respond 
to the user command 'help ls'. This naming convention is built-in to Cmd 
so you have to use it for the module to work correctly.

Kent

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