A potential simplification here:

code = f"run_module({modname}, run_name='__main__')"
globs = {
    'run_module': runpy.run_module
}

What's currently there isn't wrong, but I think the above would be slightly clearer.

Setting alter_sys=True would also be an option, but cProfile doesn't do that for regular scripts, so I don't see any particular reason for it to do it for modules.

Sure, I'll fix that and also add NEWS entry :)

Hey @ncoghlan !

So, one of the thing I tried from your code snippet was this:

        if options.module:
            modname = args[0]
            code = f"run_module({modname}, run_name='__main__')"
            globs = {
                'run_module': runpy.run_module
            }

and if I run ./python.exe -m cProfile -m timeit -n 1 to test it, it throws NameError for timeit. But this is not the case without f-strings. I'm unable to understand this behaviour. Can you please help?

This is not the case if I avoid using f-string and provide the context of running the module as globals to the runctx method. So, I'm not sure, what is wrong. Help would be much appreciated.

I think modname would need to be fed through repr(), e.g. f"run_module({modname!r}, run_name='__main__')".
That said, I think your original code is fine and I don't find @ncoghlan's suggestion more readable :-)

@pitrou is right, and the missing !r was just a bug in my suggested code. However, there's merit in the idea of using just one mechanism for passing values in (the globs dict) rather than two (string interpolation and the globs dict).

So while I still think it makes sense to pass in a reference to the run_module itself, rather than one to the runpy module, I withdraw the suggestion of using string interpolation to pass in the module name to run.

You can add a versionadded tag just after this for the -m option.

Note that -m module and myscript.py are exclusive. So the doc could/should be spelled (-m module | myscript.py).

This should be:

assert_python_failure('-m', 'cProfile', '-m', 'random_module_xyz')