I have a .pythonrc in my path, which gets loaded when I run python:
python
Loading pythonrc
>>>
The problem is that my .pythonrc is not loaded when I execute files:
python -i script.py
>>>
It would be very handy to have tab completion (and a few other things) when I load things interactively.
From the Python documentation for -i
:
When a script is passed as first argument or the -c option is used, enter interactive mode after executing the script or the command, even when sys.stdin
does not appear to be a terminal. The PYTHONSTARTUP file is not read.
I believe this is done so that scripts run predictably for all users, and do not depend on anything in a user's particular PYTHONSTARTUP file.
As Greg has noted, there is a very good reason why -i
behaves the way it does. However, I do find it pretty useful to be able to have my PYTHONSTARTUP
loaded when I want an interactive session. So, here's the code I use when I want to be able to have PYTHONSTARTUP
active in a script run with -i
.
if __name__ == '__main__':
#do normal stuff
#and at the end of the file:
import sys
if sys.flags.interactive==1:
import os
myPythonPath = os.environ['PYTHONSTARTUP'].split(os.sep)
sys.path.append(os.sep.join(myPythonPath[:-1]))
pythonrcName = ''.join(myPythonPath[-1].split('.')[:-1]) #the filename minus the trailing extension, if the extension exists
pythonrc = __import__(pythonrcName)
for attr in dir(pythonrc):
__builtins__.__dict__[attr] = getattr(pythonrc, attr)
sys.path.remove(os.sep.join(myPythonPath[:-1]))
del sys, os, pythonrc
Note that this is fairly hacky and I never do this without ensuring that my pythonrc isn't accidentally clobbering variables and builtins.
Apparently the user module provides this, but has been removed in Python 3.0. It is a bit of a security hole, depending what's in your pythonrc...
In addition to Chinmay Kanchi and Greg Hewgill's answers, I'd like to add that IPython and BPython work fine in this case. Perhaps it's time for you to switch? :)