[Tutor] trouble using 2to3.py

[Dave Angel]

Tim Golden wrote:
> Richard D. Moores wrote:
>> On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 05:30, Dave Angel <davea at ieee.org> wrote:
>>> <snip>
>>> Or the way I do it, have python31.bat and python26.bat, which launch 
>>> the
>>> exact pythons that I want.
>>
>> Thanks, Dave. I'm not familiar with .bat files. Could you give me a
>> look at one of them?
>
> As an alternative, I've created python26.exe, python31.exe etc. in my 
> c:\tools directory (which is on my PATH wherever I am) and which are 
> hardlinks to their corresponding c:\python26\python.exe etc.
> Same as the batch file, really, only without a batch file!
>
> TJG
I've thought of using hard links (using fsutil.exe, in case anyone else 
is interested), but I keep my scripts and batch files, as well as small 
utilities on a separate drive  partition from the one that has my OS and 
installed programs.  And hard links don't work across separate partitions.

But tell me, how does python.exe find its "home" directory, to set 
initial sys.path and suchlike?  I assumed it was done relative to the 
python.exe's full path location.  But if you hard link, nobody knows 
where the real executable image resides (and in fact the concept has no 
meaning, since the two directory entries equally own the content).

I once downloaded a program (which worked on many python scripts, but 
not all) which was written as a standin for python.exe, loading the 
pythonNN.dll and executing the script.  The intentional difference was 
that instead of getting the script name from the commandline, it used 
its own name as the name of the script, and searched in the same 
directory for that script.  So effectively if you made a copy of this 
program and called it  doit.exe, when it ran it would find doit.py and 
run that script.

One advantage it conferred is that the tasklist now identifies your 
program by name, instead of just having an anonymous python.exe running 
one (or six) instances.

I don't remember what it was called, but I'd love to play with it 
further.  And now I'd like to know how it could know where the lib files 
and suchlike are, as well.

DaveA