Catherine Heathcote wrote:
Something is amiss here. There's the MS Command Prompt, which I'm
looking at right now. Yes, it has cd, and so on. I'm also looking at the
Python command line window. It allow one to run interactively.
Open a command prompt ("CMD", "Console"), that black window you were
looking at.
Use the cd command to change directory to wherever your Python script is
saved.
Execute "python -V" (without the quotes). You should get a response,
including the Python version number. If you get an error like "command not
found" or similar, you'll have to use the whole path to python.exe -- try
with "c:\python25\python -V" (again, no quotes).
Once you know how to launch Python, you can:
a) Enter the interactive interpreter: Just launch Python as above but
without the -V argument. The prompt is now >>>
You can type Python expressions and the interpreter evaluates them. You
type 2+3, the interpreter answers 5; you type len("abc"), the interpreter
answers 3...
b) Or, from the command prompt, you can execute a script by launching
Python the same way as above, passing the script name as an argument:
c:\foo>python script_name.py
This is what you were looking for - in case of syntax errors or something,
you can see the output on the console. It stays open because it was open
*before* you launched Python. Just keep the window open.
See
http://docs.python.org/using/windows.html for more info. If Python
doesn't start just by typing "python", you may want to set your PATH
environment variable as described there.
