[Tutor] TSR in windows

[Jeff Shannon]

Magnus Lycke wrote:

> At 12:21 2003-06-19 +0100, Patrick Kirk wrote:
>
>> I'm writing a little application that will log all contact received 
>> on port 6346.  It works a treat except...it leaves a console window 
>> open. Right now I want to learn how to start it in the background and 
>> then I will find a way to give it a System Tray icon.
>
>
> Rename the file from something.py to something.pyw, or alternatively,
> start the program with pythonw.exe instead of python.exe. (That's
> what .pyw is associated with in Windows.)


If this is only to run on Windows with an NT base (NT4, 2K, XP), you can 
also create this as a Windows Service.  This is a somewhat more involved 
process, but it's very well described in the book "Python Programming on 
Win32".  (One of my first significant Python projects runs as a service, 
so it's not hard to do.)  This won't get you a System Tray icon or any 
sort of user interface, but it will get you something that runs reliably 
in the background and restarts itself every time that Windows is rebooted.

If you want something that runs in the system tray, though, you'll need 
to use some sort of GUI toolkit such as wxPython.  I'm not sure how that 
might interact with the service framework, or if it will cooperate at 
all... (Services are generally not meant to have a GUI; those that do, 
it's typically a separate program that saves configuration parameters 
and then restarts the service with the new parameters.)

Jeff Shannon
Technician/Programmer
Credit International