I need some advice/help on running my scripts

[Sean]

For the last couple of months I have been reading and working throught
the examples in Magnus Lie Hetland's Book "Practical Python"  This for
all practical purposes is the first computer programming language I
have spent any time at learning, so much of what I have covered in the
book was for the first time.

My problem is that many of the example scripts are run on Linux
machines and I am using Win XP Pro.  Here is a specific example of what
is confusing me.  If I want to open a file from the dos prompt in some
script do I just write the name of the file I want to open (assuming it
is in the same directory) after the script name?
such as

c:\some_script.py some_text_file.txt

Does piping work the same way in dos as it does on a linux machine?
And last but not least, is there a way to do this all from IDLE?