How to handle one or more file inputs

[weiji14]

Description of the desired feature

There are a lot of GMT processing scripts that take in one or more table/grid inputs, and I was wondering how this should be handled. This came up as I was trying to wrap text at #321 and it also applies to grdtrack at #308 and other functions (see e.g. this search).

In gmt bash, it looks something like this:

gmt func data1.txt data2.txt -A -B -C

Implementation ideas

So the least amount of work would be to disallow multiple file inputs and force the user write a for-loop to process each file separately. This 'feature' would then need to be documented somewhere.

Another way I've thought about is to patch the kwargs_to_string function in decorators.py to include a 'sequence_space' convertor. This means a user can pass in a list of filenames (e.g. ["data1.txt", "data2.txt"]) which will be converted into a space-separated string (i.e. "data1.txt data2.txt") that can then be passed into the wrapper function when we do:

arg_str = " ".join([fnames, build_arg_string(kwargs)])
lib.call_module("somefunction", arg_str)

Thoughts?

Are you willing to help implement and maintain this feature? Yes!