Command line interface

Since version 2.3 PyMVPA includes a command line interface that allows for using PyMVPA in shell scripts and other non-Python environments. The scope of the command line interface is to expose the most commonly used building blocks of PyMVPA and connect them using a series of commands, where intermediate results are stored in HDF5 files. It is not intended to provide the same flexibility as the Python API, but aims to avoid boilerplate code for the most commonly used analysis and processing strategies.

At present, the command line interface is still in its early development stages and future API changes cannot be ruled out, and further extensions are expected for future releases.

When installed, PyMVPA offers a single pymvpa2 command through which all supported functionality is made available. Analogous to the Python interface, the command line interface is broken down into modules that individually serve a specific purpose, and can be combined into more complex analysis pipelines. Each module is exposed as a sub-command of pymvpa2. All sub-commands are documented individually below.

Both the primary command pymvpa2, as well as all sub-commands support specific options that need to be given in the right location on the command line. The basic structure of any command line is this:

$ pymvpa2 [{{primary options}}] {{sub-command}} [{{secondary options}}]

where [] indicates an optional segment, primary options are any options for the main pymvpa2 command, and secondary options are options of a sub-command. For example:

$ pymvpa2 --help

will yield the documentation of the main command, but:

$ pymvpa2 mkds --help

will yield the documentation of the mkds sub-command.

Documentation of the main pymvpa2 command

The documentation of the pymvpa2 command (accessible via --help) includes a list of all available sub-commands on a particular system.

Example scripts

Here are a few executable example that come with the PyMVPA source code and demonstrate how to use PyMVPA’s command line interface in actual scripts.

For developers

Create a new PyMVPA command

For now just a few notes:

  • No positional arguments, only options

    The majority of all commands (can) have very complex argument lists. Positional arguments are harder to identify, and only offer a flat list for structured input, without the possibility to specify nested list like input.

  • whenever possible use (and improve) common option definitions from mvpa2.cmdline.helpers

  • An option specifying an output location should be called -o/-output-…

  • Whenever a dataset needs to be loaded and there is no special reason to do anything fancy, arg2ds() should be used to load it.

    This will allow all relevant command to vstack input datasets on the fly, and significantly shapes the “standard” workflow, as data can be keep in fine grained structures avoiding the need to produce tailored datasets for any particular operation.

  • If a command requires multiple separate datasets multiple –input options should be used to specify them.