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The command ("info", "reportGen", etc) should be a first tier argument, not just squirreled away as the first entry in arguments (or options.misc after #26).

I think it should be as straightforward as adding

    parser.add_argument('command', metavar="COMMAND", help="command to invoke", nargs=1, type=str.lower)

(The type=str.lower makes it case insensitive.)

This will cause glance to automatically fail with an error if no command is provided. The error will look something like:

usage: [-h] COMMAND
glance: error: too few arguments

I think that's a feature.

We'd need to modify

    parser.add_argument('misc', metavar='COMMAND [FILE [VARIABLE]]+', nargs='*')

to remove the COMMAND bit.

The logic in main in compare.py should change from

    # if what the user asked for is not one of our existing functions, print the help
    if ((not args) or (args[0].lower() not in lower_locals)):
        if options.version:
            return 0
        options.print_help()
        help()
        return 9
    else:
        # call the function the user named, given the arguments from the command line, lowercase the request to ignore case
        rc = lower_locals[args[0].lower()](*args[1:])
        return 0 if rc is None else rc

to

    # if what the user asked for is not one of our existing functions, print the help
    if ((options.command is None or options.command == "") or (options.command.lower() not in lower_locals)):
        if options.version:
            return 0
        options.print_help()
        help()
        return 9
    else:
        # call the function the user named, given the arguments from the command line, lowercase the request to ignore case
        rc = lower_locals[options.command.lower()](*args)
        return 0 if rc is None else rc

For bonus points, have main() pass a list of valid commands in to parse_arguments(), and use that to set a list of choices= so argparse can automatically filter invalid commands.