@karzes: If you read all of the messages above, you'll find that the behavior is deeply baked in to argparse. So, no, there is no fix for this issue.

I'm not sure about others, but I believe that the behavior is so deeply ingrained in how argparse works that it can't be changed. I have the same desire as you: to use a command line parser that works like all other Unix commands. I've switched my personal code to click. There's also Appeal, typer, and others.

Unlike when argparse was added to the stdlib, at this point installing modules from PyPI is sufficiently easy that I'm not sure it makes sense to advocate for another command line parser in the stdlib.