A positional argument is assigned according to its place in an argument list. On a command line, the first value fills the first expected position, the second fills the second, and so on. This differs from a flag, which is an optional named switch that changes a command’s behavior. section 9.3
Keep these two uses separate:
- Command-line positional arguments carry data or filters by position; Unix zip uses the archive name first, followed by files to include. section 9.3
- Django management commands receive command-line strings through argparse, while flags such as --verbose or -v are optional behavior controls. section 9.3
- Django’s generic Model.objects.create() method does not accept positional field values; supply field names as keyword arguments instead. section 4.4
Filtering musicians from the terminal
A musicians management command can be run with filters such as `python manage.py musicians --last_name Loblaw`. Here, the filter value belongs to the named `--last_name` option rather than to a positional slot. By contrast, a positional command could interpret its first value as one kind of filter and its second value as another, based only on their order. section 9.3
