[asked on comp.lang.python but no takers. So I'm bumping it up a notch.] I have ported my Python debugger pydbgr to Python3. See [1] or [2]. Inside the debugger, when there is an exec() somewhere in the call stack, I'd like to be able to retrieve the string parameter. With this, the debugger can show part of the string in a call stack. Or it can show the text when the frame is set to that exec() frame. Going further, the debugger could write the exec string out to a temporary file. And when reporting locations, it could report not just something like "<string> line 4", but also give that temporary file name which a front-end could use as well. So consider this code using inspect.getargvalues() and inspect.currentframe(): import inspect def my_exec(string): show_args(inspect.currentframe()) # simulate exec(string) def show_args(frame): print(inspect.getargvalues(frame)) my_exec("show_args(inspect.currentframe())") exec("show_args(inspect.currentframe())") When run this is the output: python3 exec-args.py ArgInfo(args=['string'], varargs=None, keywords=None, locals={'string': 'show_args(inspect.currentframe())'}) ArgInfo(args=[], varargs=None, keywords=None, locals={'my_exec': ,, ... In a different setting, CPython byte-code assembly that gets generated for running exec() is: 25 88 LOAD_GLOBAL 10 (exec) 91 LOAD_CONST 4 ('show_args(inspect.currentframe())') --> 94 CALL_FUNCTION 1 97 POP_TOP What's going on? Also, I have the same question for CPython 2.6 or Python 2.7. Thanks! [1] http://code.google.com/p/pydbgr/ [2] http://code.google.com/p/python3-trepan/