Python documentation here

Example

$python -m pydoc pydoc

Talk about eating your own dogfood! This is exactly like using the help() function in the python command line interpreter… except accessible from your shell prompt…. but wait!

It’ gets better! Not only does it make julian fries ( may not for any implementation ) but it’s got a few versatile little secrets

$ python -m pydoc
pydoc - the Python documentation tool

pydoc.py  ...
    Show text documentation on something.   may be the name of a
    Python keyword, topic, function, module, or package, or a dotted
    reference to a class or function within a module or module in a
    package.  If  contains a '/', it is used as the path to a
    Python source file to document. If name is 'keywords', 'topics',
    or 'modules', a listing of these things is displayed.

pydoc.py -k 
    Search for a keyword in the synopsis lines of all available modules.

pydoc.py -p 
    Start an HTTP server on the given port on the local machine.

pydoc.py -g
    Pop up a graphical interface for finding and serving documentation.

pydoc.py -w  ...
    Write out the HTML documentation for a module to a file in the current
    directory.  If  contains a '/', it is treated as a filename; if
    it names a directory, documentation is written for all the contents.

Now the graphical interface isn’t anything to write home about, but the -p option provides a no thrills web interface to
almost everything accessible to your python interpreter. This can make it slightly easier to troll through foreign modules
looking for undocumented sub modules and classes… or having an accessible reference doc for properly managed modules

Python documentation here

Unfortunately there is little or no documentation on the command line properties of urllib but it does recognize everything that urllib can handle. So
python -m urllib http://website.com will grab the specified url and print to std out

Note FTP works as well but you need to follow the pattern ftp://user:password@website.com if authentication is required

Python documentation here

Example

python -m dis myFile.py provides an interesting look into a python file’s guts
I could easily imagine this being part of some sort of static time inspect system where dis sits at the front and a parse
walks down the output lines, turning the data into a dependency and symbol graph. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to provide anything more and is really just a test function most likely intended for unit-testing the python stdlib.

When working on pure javascript applications ( canvas widgets & such ), I’ve found using the SimpleHTTPServer disgustingly useful as it serves the current working directly without much thrills.

Python documentation here

Usage

$ python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8081 0.0.0.0
Serving HTTP on 0.0.0.0 port 8081 ...

Note that it’s not necessary to set the 2nd argument to 0.0.0.0 if you want the service to listen on all routes. It normally will by default listen on everything… just habit for me to always append that.

Another useful part of this server is that it servers an apache directory style listing of all file’s present unless there is a valid index file like index.htm present.