The Python interpreter is usually installed as /usr/local/bin/python on those machines where it is available; putting /usr/local/bin in your Unix shell's search path makes it possible to start it by typing the command
to the shell. Since the choice of the directory where the interpreter lives is an installation option, other places are possible; check with your local Python guru or system administrator. (E.g., /usr/local/python is a popular alternative location.)
Typing an end-of-file character (Control-D on Unix, Control-Z on Windows) at the primary prompt causes the interpreter to exit with a zero exit status. If that doesn't work, you can exit the interpreter by typing the following commands: "import sys; sys.exit()".
The interpreter's line-editing features usually aren't very
sophisticated. On Unix, whoever installed the interpreter may have
enabled support for the GNU readline library, which adds more
elaborate interactive editing and history features. Perhaps the
quickest check to see whether command line editing is supported is
typing Control-P to the first Python prompt you get. If it beeps, you
have command line editing; see Appendix A for an
introduction to the keys. If nothing appears to happen, or if
P is echoed, command line editing isn't available; you'll
only be able to use backspace to remove characters from the current
The interpreter operates somewhat like the Unix shell: when called with standard input connected to a tty device, it reads and executes commands interactively; when called with a file name argument or with a file as standard input, it reads and executes a script from that file.
A second way of starting the interpreter is "python -c command [arg] ...", which executes the statement(s) in command, analogous to the shell's -c option. Since Python statements often contain spaces or other characters that are special to the shell, it is best to quote command in its entirety with double quotes.
Some Python modules are also useful as scripts. These can be invoked using "python -m module [arg] ...", which executes the source file for module as if you had spelled out its full name on the command line.
Note that there is a difference between "python file" and "python <file". In the latter case, input requests from the program, such as calls to input() and raw_input(), are satisfied from file. Since this file has already been read until the end by the parser before the program starts executing, the program will encounter end-of-file immediately. In the former case (which is usually what you want) they are satisfied from whatever file or device is connected to standard input of the Python interpreter.
When a script file is used, it is sometimes useful to be able to run the script and enter interactive mode afterwards. This can be done by passing -i before the script. (This does not work if the script is read from standard input, for the same reason as explained in the previous paragraph.)
When known to the interpreter, the script name and additional
arguments thereafter are passed to the script in the variable
sys.argv, which is a list of strings. Its length is at least
one; when no script and no arguments are given,
an empty string. When the script name is given as
sys.argv is set to
-c command is used,
sys.argv is set to
'-c'. When -m module is used,
is set to the full name of the located module. Options found after
-c command or -m module are not consumed
by the Python interpreter's option processing but left in
the command or module to handle.
When commands are read from a tty, the interpreter is said to be in
interactive mode. In this mode it prompts for the next command
with the primary prompt, usually three greater-than signs
>> "); for continuation lines it prompts with the
secondary prompt, by default three dots ("... ").
The interpreter prints a welcome message stating its version number
and a copyright notice before printing the first prompt:
python Python 1.5.2b2 (#1, Feb 28 1999, 00:02:06) [GCC 2.8.1] on sunos5 Copyright 1991-1995 Stichting Mathematisch Centrum, Amsterdam >>>
Continuation lines are needed when entering a multi-line construct. As an example, take a look at this if statement:
>>> the_world_is_flat = 1 >>> if the_world_is_flat: ... print "Be careful not to fall off!" ... Be careful not to fall off!
When an error occurs, the interpreter prints an error message and a stack trace. In interactive mode, it then returns to the primary prompt; when input came from a file, it exits with a nonzero exit status after printing the stack trace. (Exceptions handled by an except clause in a try statement are not errors in this context.) Some errors are unconditionally fatal and cause an exit with a nonzero exit; this applies to internal inconsistencies and some cases of running out of memory. All error messages are written to the standard error stream; normal output from the executed commands is written to standard output.
Typing the interrupt character (usually Control-C or DEL) to the primary or secondary prompt cancels the input and returns to the primary prompt.2.1Typing an interrupt while a command is executing raises the KeyboardInterrupt exception, which may be handled by a try statement.
On BSD'ish Unix systems, Python scripts can be made directly executable, like shell scripts, by putting the line
#! /usr/bin/env python
(assuming that the interpreter is on the user's PATH) at the beginning of the script and giving the file an executable mode. The "#!" must be the first two characters of the file. On some platforms, this first line must end with a Unix-style line ending ("\n"), not a Mac OS ("\r") or Windows ("\r\n") line ending. Note that the hash, or pound, character, "#", is used to start a comment in Python.
The script can be given a executable mode, or permission, using the chmod command:
$ chmod +x myscript.py
It is possible to use encodings different than ASCII in Python source
files. The best way to do it is to put one more special comment line
right after the
#! line to define the source file encoding:
# -*- coding: encoding -*-
With that declaration, all characters in the source file will be treated as having the encoding encoding, and it will be possible to directly write Unicode string literals in the selected encoding. The list of possible encodings can be found in the Python Library Reference, in the section on codecs.
For example, to write Unicode literals including the Euro currency symbol, the ISO-8859-15 encoding can be used, with the Euro symbol having the ordinal value 164. This script will print the value 8364 (the Unicode codepoint corresponding to the Euro symbol) and then exit:
# -*- coding: iso-8859-15 -*- currency = u"€" print ord(currency)
If your editor supports saving files as
UTF-8 with a UTF-8
byte order mark (aka BOM), you can use that instead of an
encoding declaration. IDLE supports this capability if
Options/General/Default Source Encoding/UTF-8 is set. Notice
that this signature is not understood in older Python releases (2.2
and earlier), and also not understood by the operating system for
script files with
#! lines (only used on Unix systems).
By using UTF-8 (either through the signature or an encoding declaration), characters of most languages in the world can be used simultaneously in string literals and comments. Using non-ASCII characters in identifiers is not supported. To display all these characters properly, your editor must recognize that the file is UTF-8, and it must use a font that supports all the characters in the file.
When you use Python interactively, it is frequently handy to have some standard commands executed every time the interpreter is started. You can do this by setting an environment variable named PYTHONSTARTUP to the name of a file containing your start-up commands. This is similar to the .profile feature of the Unix shells.
This file is only read in interactive sessions, not when Python reads
commands from a script, and not when /dev/tty is given as the
explicit source of commands (which otherwise behaves like an
interactive session). It is executed in the same namespace where
interactive commands are executed, so that objects that it defines or
imports can be used without qualification in the interactive session.
You can also change the prompts
If you want to read an additional start-up file from the current directory, you can program this in the global start-up file using code like "if os.path.isfile('.pythonrc.py'): execfile('.pythonrc.py')". If you want to use the startup file in a script, you must do this explicitly in the script:
import os filename = os.environ.get('PYTHONSTARTUP') if filename and os.path.isfile(filename): execfile(filename)