detect interactivity

[Dave Angel]

Roald de Vries wrote:
> On Dec 29, 2009, at 8:34 PM, Dave Angel wrote:
>> Antoine Pitrou wrote:
>>> Le Tue, 29 Dec 2009 16:09:58 +0100, Roald de Vries a écrit :
>>>
>>>
>>>> Dear all,
>>>>
>>>> Is it possible for a Python script to detect whether it is running
>>>> interactively? It can be useful for e.g. defining functions that are
>>>> only useful in interactive mode.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Try the isatty() method (*) on e.g. stdin:
>>>
>>> $ python -c "import sys; print sys.stdin.isatty()"
>>> True
>>> $ echo "" | python -c "import sys; print sys.stdin.isatty()"
>>> False
>>>
>> Your test determines whether input is redirected.  But I think the OP 
>> was asking how to detect whether the script was being run from an 
>> interpreter prompt.
>
> That was my question indeed. Is it possible?
>
>
If I had had a good answer, I would have supplied it in my earlier message.

The sneaky answer would be that a script cannot be used interactively, 
as once you import it from the interpreter, it's a module, not a 
script.  So you can detect that it's not a script, by examing __name__ 
in the usual way.  If it's a script, it'll have a value of "__main__".

But that won't tell you if you're running inside an IDE, or using the -i 
switch on the Python command line, or probably a bunch of other 
questions.  I don't know of any "correct" answer, and I'm not sure what 
the real use case is for knowing.  Are you really going to somehow 
define a different set of functions???

But I'm sure someone else will know something more explicitly tied to 
the interactive session.  If that's indeed what you want to test for.

DaveA