XXX This should probably be dumped in an appendix, since most people don't use Python interactively in non-trivial ways.
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 name space 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 sys.ps1
and sys.ps2
in
this file.
If you want to read an additional start-up file from the current
directory, you can program this in the global start-up file, e.g.
execfile('.pythonrc')
. If you want to use the startup file
in a script, you must write this explicitly in the script, e.g.
import os;
execfile(os.environ['PYTHONSTARTUP'])
.