[Tutor] Launching a file browser

[Mike Hall]

On Apr 1, 2005, at 4:12 PM, Jeff Shannon wrote:

> At the OS level, these two actions are *completely* different.  The
> webbrowser module launches an entirely separate program in its own
> independent process, where the "file browser" is opening a standard
> dialog inside of the current process and dependent upon the current
> process' message loop.  (AFAIK, every GUI environment uses some sort
> of message/event loop...)
>
> I don't know Macs, but on Windows, the closest "file browser" parallel
> to what the webbrowser module is doing would be
> os.system("explorer.exe"), which launches a separate program in an
> independent process.  However, if you're trying to get the results of
> the file selection back into your own app, you need to do the file
> browsing within your own process (or explicitly use some form of
> inter-process communication).  In order to use a GUI file-browsing
> dialog, you need to follow all the rules for a GUI program.

Thanks Jeff. This further clarifies it for me.


-MH